Intro

Gameplay

Zelda afficionados will recognize the similarities between Crystalis and the original Legend of Zelda. Crystalis plays in an overhead fashion just like Zelda. After a few minutes of playing, players will realize how much more advanced Crystalis is. Your character moves at a fairly quick pace, and you can move diagnally as well as the four cardinal directions. Each of the four swords in Crystalis can also shoot beams of energy much like in Zelda. However, you don't need a full life meter in Crystalis, you simply hold down the B button to charge up your sword. Unfortunately, you can't walk and charge at the same time. While this isn't problematic at the start of the game, later on hordes of enemies fire multiple volleys of shots at you and then you have various flying enemies to contend with. The inability to move while charging up your sword can make dodging enemy attacks very difficult. In most games your character is invincible for a few moments after taking a hit, thus allowing you to escape from further danger in a few situations. You don't have the said luxury in Crystalis. Your character is knocked back quite a ways after taking a hit and if you happen to be surrounded, you will just keep bouncing back and forth between enemies like a pinball taking damage. Unfortunately, you can't take much damage in this game, even with the strongest armor. Luckily, as with most games of this genre, you have varous items and spells to help you. While you can take damage quickly, you can also recover health just as quickly using the Refresh spell. You simply keep holding down the A button until you are at full health. Without the aforementioned spell, there are several points in the game where death is almost inevitable. Of course, you have other spells like teleport, recover(cures poison, etc.), change(morph into one of four characters), and others. There are also various items in the game ranging from health healing herbs, antidote plants, and magic rings which restore magic points.

Crystalis is considered an RPG by some people. Like any other RPG, you can fight monsters to gain experience to toughen up your character for future battles. In Crystalis, your levels can only go up to 16, but at this level, most monsters in the game won't present much of a threat to your character. One major flaw with the Crystalis level system is you can't harm some bosses unless you are at a certain level. There is nothing more frustrating than working through a maze of caves only to find you can't hurt the boss at the end simply because you need to be one level higher. Experience isn't the only thing to be won from battles, as coins are dropped by monsters that represent a certain amount of gold. You can use this gold to buy armor, which offers you protection from direct contact with monsters, and shields, which offer protection against enemy projectiles. Like any other RPG, the various townspeople offer helpful information and sometimes may say different things if you talk to them more than once or if you talk to them later in the game.

The biggest gripe I can voice about the gameplay is some swords do not harm certain monsters. It is rather annoying to get a new sword, only to find that it doesn't harm half of the enemies you must fight in the area. There are some dungeons where one sword works on certain monsters, and another sword works on others. While it wouldn't be as bad if you could just keep one sword equipped for the whole dungeon, it becomes rather cumbersome when you have to keep switching back and forth between swords to be able to hurt all the monsters to build experience and gold quickly.

Graphics

If you are patient enough to watch the cinemas before the actual game starts, you are in for a visual treat. SNK made good use of colors and the scenes are very well detailed. The graphics in the game itself are very well done too. The characters and monsters are very well drawn and the outskirts of town have various details like thick patches of grass, trees, rivers, rocks, and even swamps. However, the animation could use a bit of work. Most of the bosses only stay in one pose and float around the room shooting at you. The first boss, the vampire, really looks nothing like a vampire, it looks more like a giant blue bug that shoots bats at you. Your character doesn't look natural as he's moving since his arms barely seem to move as he walks, and the same can be said of the townspeople. Another major gripe about the graphics are the caves. While the outside world is very well detailed, the caves are rather bland and all the sections seem to look alike. This can be a major problem if you don't know exactly where you are going since you don't have many landmarks to go by. All in all though, the graphics in Crystalis are quite good. The game makes good use of colors and most of the characters and monsters are well drawn.

Music and Sound

In my own humble opinion, the purpose of music in a video game is to set the mood and theme for the situation. The music in Crystalis does this very well. In the town, the music is very calm and laid back, while the music for the outside world is very upbeat and energetic. Also, the music you hear while in a certain town is rather sad giving you a sense of foreboding that something bad is about to happen. The sound effects are good too, the sound effect for the sword charging up sounds nice. All the various spells have their own little sound effect that fits the respective spell very nicely. However, they could have made taking a hit sound less annoying, it makes this high pitched beep. I also find it odd that whenever you hit a monster you can't harm for whatever reason you hear a clanging sound. Are the monsters actually robots? I thought they were supposed to be mutated animals.

Conclusion

Although Crystalis has a few notable flaws, it is still a very good game. The few flaws it does have are not nearly enough to detract from it's great gamplay and storyline. Instead of being bored to death with a slow turn system, you can just charge up your sword and blow away anything that dares to stand in your way. This makes building up levels and accumulating gold a breeze. Like any other RPG, Crystalis is not too difficult as long as your levels are high enough. However, the aspect I like best about Crystalis is the storyline. You start off being unfrozen from a computer with little idea about what's going on. However, the storyline slowly opens up and more and more is revealed until you finally learn who you really are and what purpose you have on this world. In many games you just have one ultimate goal with very little in between, but that's not the case in Crystalis. While your ultimate goal is to restore the world to the way it should be, there are several subquests in between that give the player a sense of accomplishment and keeps you interested in the game. Along the way you will perform deeds such as saving a child from the swamp, healing people who have been turned to stone, freeing slaves, and this isn't even half of the game. Of course, most of these deeds will either allow you to progress in the game or you will gain some helpful item that does something like boosting your armor. There are also a few weapons, armor, and items that must be found in various dungeons giving Crystalis some replay value in case you don't find everything the first time. In conclusion, get this game. If you even liked Zelda one bit, you will enjoy Crystalis immensely.

Ratings

• Graphics-8.5
• Music and Sound-9.5
• Gameplay and Fun-10
• Play Control-8
• Replayability-9
• Challenge-Fairly Easy
• Overall(not an average)-9.5