Written by Edwin Francisco
CrisTales by Dream Uncorporated, is a JRPG focuses on the main character Crisbell who lives in a city called Narim. You see the world through her eyes. She has the ability to see the past, the present and the future, all at the same time.
You’ll meet a character named Willhelm who tells you that Crisbell is a time mage.
Although Willhelm is a time mage himself, he says he can’t see the world the way she sees it.
Because of her ability to see the past, present, and future; she is able to see how a city started and how it falls. The quests that you finish can have an impact on how you see the future.
Finding an object in the past that you bring into the present, can have a future that is bright. It’s all rather interesting when you think about it.
Not long after you help the city of Narim, you are forced to leave and to discover more of the world.
The story told in the game is quite interesting, but the first half of CrisTales focuses on side quests.
With each location that you get to, you are tasked to figure out how to improve the city since you do see that its future is generally in a bad situation.
While doing all the side quests, the main story is told in small bits.
Side quests are optional, but it does affect the end result of the game. In each city, just before the end of the chapter, the game does ask you if you’ve done everything already.
Because once you finish a chapter, you can’t go back to fix them. If you have done all the quests, you are given choices on how to finish the chapter.
Miss one or two quests and your options to finish a chapter will be limited.
One thing, since you do see the future of the city, it can be quite disappointing to leave for the next area seeing that you left the city in ruins.
If you finish all the quests, you can see the future of the city in glorious wonder.
Another thing about the side quests is that, if you miss or don’t finish a side quest, you won’t get the best ending.
That can be frustrating in the long run since there is no way for you to go back and correct them. The only way for you to get correct it is by playing the game from the beginning all over again.
Once you are done with the side quests for all of the towns that you go through, the story picks up really fast, and the pacing also gets a lot better too.
Review: CrisTales by Dream Uncorporated
When I was doing side quests, the game felt a little dragging to me, but it did get me curious to finish every little story.
But once all of that was done, the main story felt like it went into high gear and I wanted to see how it all ends.
The game only has five cities which are located in 4 islands. That’s the entire world of CrisTales.
The world is actually pretty small. But don’t let that fool you. The game has a lot to offer.
A Tribute to Japanese Role Playing Games
The game plays out like a typical JRPG. It has the city view where you can basically talk to several NPCs, and you are for the most part, safe and don’t have to worry about any battles.
There is also the adventure view, where you are expecting random battles. Yes it’s random like most classic style JPRGs.
And we also have the overworld view, where you look at the map and you can just move freely and reach far destinations without breaking a sweat. You are safe while traveling using the overworld view.
The look and style of the game doesn’t stand out as a traditional JRPG.
This is mainly because the independent development studio, Dreams Uncorporated, is based in Colombia.
Developers of CrisTales do admit that the game is a tribute to games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Persona.
What makes this different from most JRPGs is that it tackles with time as part of it’s basic mechanic. This only is useful while doing random battles, or when you are in a city which is more prominent.
Review: CrisTales by Dream Uncorporated
When you go into cities, you immediately see the three different time periods. Left is the past, center is present, right is the future.
Crisbell or any of the main characters can’t travel through time, but you do have a talking frog companion named Matias who can jump forward or back in time to interact on object or listen to characters.
In the adventure mode, you can’t see the different time periods. But there are certain points in the area where you can manipulate the age of the object.
Like, you can reverse time on a broken bridge and be able to repair it, or move time forward to turn it into dust. I actually like this idea.
CrisTales’ main game mechanics felt that it has a lot of potential, but it didn’t push it. I actually like the concept, but it felt lacking to me.
It just made me feel that there could be so much more to the game like more time based puzzles and storylines.
Would it not have been interesting when you go to adventure mode and see a secret cave in the past but had to figure out how to get inside it?
It just didn’t make any sense to me why Crisbell can’t see the past or the future when they walk outside of the city.
It’s A Small World
Visually, this is not the typical JRPG that you expect. Since the game was made in Colombia, the art design shows a lot here. The cities in the game are heavily inspired by Colombian architecture.
The art style reminds me a lot of Disney’s “It’s a Small World” but it has this anime touch to it.
If you are not familiar with that, then you can also look for the art of Mary Blair which is the designer of “It’s a Small World.” The look is very clean, like a children’s book.
Even when you walk around in the map overworld style, it reminds of you of patchwork art since some areas look like it was stitched together.
There are no shadows, ray tracing, or any visual style that tell you that it’s a modern game. It really is a piece of art when you look at it. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea though.
Personally I was hesitant to play the game because of it. But after playing so many hours of it, it didn’t really bother me and I did appreciate the style.
Although, it’s not a visual style that will justify having a high gaming rig, but its looks is easy on the eyes and kids can really appreciate it.
The anime style doesn’t really stand out early in the game, but there are certain characters that do. Almost like it was done by a different artist.
It’s a little disorienting, but it doesn’t distract you from the game.
A typical JRPG battle? Or is it?
The battle mechanic is familiar if you have played a lot of turn based JRPGs.
But you have to be a bit more attentive to the fight since if you are being attacked, you need to press the action button on the right time the block properly.
Timing is different for each type of attack. You do need to get familiar with the enemies and their attack patterns.
The main character has the special ability to manipulate time during the battle. It can make your opponents age younger or older. Although her character is not the typical lead.
She is designed mainly as a support character in battle since her basic attacks are generally weak. But she can heal, slow down opponents, speed up allies and such.
Using the time mechanic in the battle can get a bit interesting. Like if you poison an enemy.
Poison in games usually takes too long to take effect. But since the main lead character can move time forward, it can be an instant kill once she is able to apply the time effect.
Each character will have their own special ability, some of the characters will have some ways of changing the gameplay. This was really interesting and I enjoyed it.
I just didn’t like this robot character named, Jkr721, even though he has strong physical attacks, you had to press the action button as fast as you can to get the best results.
I usually don’t like that mechanic since I worry that I might break the controller by doing that high fast repetitive action.
Review: CrisTales by Dream Uncorporated
The main problem with CrisTales’ battle system is that it doesn’t really offer anything interesting in terms of gameplay.
It has this interesting mechanic that is being introduced with each new character, but it doesn’t force you to use them.
It was only when the major bosses were the ones I needed to defeat where I needed to think carefully what I needed to do.
But for minor bosses, I just mostly relied on either JKR721 for physical attacks or Christopher for magical attacks. Of course I can’t remove Crisabell because she is the main support character and she’s the only one that can manipulate time.
Difficulty can get a bit steep but most of the time too easy. The first time I played the game was actually pretty difficult. I died a few times since I think I was still adjusting to the game.
But most of the game was actually pretty easy to get through. Like 90% of the game was a breeze since enemies were just randomly attacking and had predictable patterns.
There are only a couple of bosses that immediately jumped into the hard mode, and it was disorienting.
From a breezily flowing game play to sudden punch to the face was a bit of a shock to me.
Your brain was not trained in the game to shift your gaming from being relaxed to actually focus on planning each set of moves you make.
Bugs
The game has some issues with graphics. I was playing it on the Xbox Series X and I saw some far textures that didn’t load well giving off some weird colors.
This only happened to me in the sewer level and it didn’t happen again in any other areas. I did restart the game and checked if it will happen again, and it did.
There are graphical bugs that flicker in the screen. The graphics of the game is very clean to the eyes, so the graphical flickering can be slightly distracting.
There were times that there were objects that didn’t load, to the point that I even got stuck in a section of the last location of the game. I got stuck that I had to reload my game.
There are NPC’s that seem to say things that didn’t make any sense. There was a character that I healed in a city. He said that he was happy to have been healed.
But when I returned to him, even if he looks healed up, his speech still says that he’s still sick.
Most of the time, the audio of the action that you are doing is not there. I noticed this with JKR721’s punches. At times you can hear it, but half of the time, it was silent.
With all the bugs that I did encounter in the game, in general, it didn’t bother me much except for that one time that I had to restart the game.
Last minute thoughts
CrisTales has lots of potential, it’s just rather short and it really didn’t feel like the developers took advantage of all the possibilities of the game.
Review: CrisTales by Dream Uncorporated
The story it was telling me was actually interesting although it’s not as deep when you start, but it really picks up after you’ve done all the side quests.
It was interesting enough to have kept me playing and wondering where the game will take me.
For a JRPG, CrisTales does not take long to finish. It can be finished in less than 40 hours. But I did get tired of the gameplay.
By the end of the 40 hours, I just wanted it to be done.
I’m playing the game through Gamepass. The game is available on both the Xbox console and the PC. But apparently this is not a PlayAnywhere game, which means that the game saves doesn’t sync between systems.
Overall, Cristales is actually impressive for the small world it provides.
Don’t distract yourself with the word “small.” This game has a lot to offer and it is quite impressive for the sheer amount of story that it tells you.
The game really got me engaged for the most part even though I did find the gameplay itself lacking.
I do recommend it despite the unmaximized potential of the gameplay, since it is entertaining from start to finish story wise.
CrisTales is available on Steam, Epic Games, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and the Xbox Series X/S at $39.99
Rating of 3.5 out of 5
Game released on July 20, 2021
Developed by Dreams Uncorporated
Published by Modus Games
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