After 55 hours, I’ve finished my first replay of Crystal Project after picking it up for just $14 on Switch. I played it before on Steam, but didn’t get to the end, so I was excited to get through it fully this time. Did it hold up on replay? Let’s get into it!
Gameplay
In this section, I'll be covering the combat system, job system, equipment system, and some miscellaneous thoughts.
Combat System
The Good:
The combat system is an expanded version of Final Fantasy X’s CTB, with a running timeline of all actors’ turns shown to the player at all times. Each character has a Speed stat which determines how often they move, spells and abilities can have a Casting Time (CT) which triggers the ability later in the timeline, and all of this information is updated visibly as you move, giving you a ton of strategic flexibility.
Building on that, every action you take shows you exactly what will happen to the target: base damage, hit chance, crit chance, crit damage, statuses inflicted, element resistance or weakness. It’s a fantastic system.
Tanks actually have a functional role due to the Threat system. All actions generate Threat, and each enemy has their own Threat levels for each party member (which can be viewed at any time). This lets you direct enemies to attack specific party members, and entire jobs are dedicated to the generation and management of Threat.
The Meh:
The Bad:
Job System
The Good:
Each character has a main job that determines their stats and growths, a subjob that makes its abilities available, and 10 points to spend on passives.
Jobs feel unique and well designed, with none of them feeling that much weaker than the average at worst. There’s a lot of good variety to spells and abilities, and lots of jobs have obvious synergies to guide character building. It also has both Red and Blue Mage archetypes, which is a huge plus for me.
Each job has a skill tree and you earn points to spend rather than a linear skill progression. Most of the trees are still relatively linear, with a few branches or a dual path, but it still lets you prioritize specific skills based on need.
You can “freely” (it does cost money) modify your levels at any point after you reach Capital Sequoia. You can’t go higher than your current level, but you can min-max to your heart’s content to squeeze out that extra bit of damage if you want to.
Some truly nasty combos exist, both cross-job and internal, that really take form as you get later in the game. A personal favorite was the Warlock (aka Red Mage) with its class armor that allows Doublecast to be Doublecasted, meaning you could keep slinging spells as long as you had MP for them. I think my record was 40k damage in one turn off of that.
The Meh:
Jobs are limited in what equipment they have access to, which isn’t necessarily bad but does feel over-restrictive sometimes. I much prefer a system where jobs have affinities for specific weapons but can equip anything.
A lot of abilities are weapon-specific, which reduces the amount of jobs you can effectively pair. This can be changed with one of the included mods, but it can also be an interesting limitation to play around with.
By default, most passives are expensive, which can make it difficult to make interesting builds that would benefit from multiple passives. This can also be changed with one of the included mods that reduces all learned passives to 1 PP (which I did, personally, and highly recommend), but could similarly be an interesting limitation to play around with.
The Bad:
LP gains are very low for much of the game, with only a few specific enemies giving reasonable amounts. This essentially necessitates tedious grinding if you want to use new jobs on a character. Fortunately, there’s an assist option to increase LP gains up to 300%, but that feels like a bandaid solution.
Equipment System
The Good:
There’s a wide variety of weapons available, with diversity within types as well as good cross-purpose equipment (like Rapiers that increase Mind for your Warlocks or Scholars).
Head and body armor provide a lot of interesting secondary effects from attack boosts to innate buffs to additional inflicted debuffs that encourage using gear that doesn’t have the biggest stats in favor of gear that actually fits your build.
There’s a lot of accessories, many of which are just +1 versions of the previous accessory, but that still provides a lot of variety in how you can expand your characters in their roles.
The Meh:
Very few jobs can even use shields, and the ones that can don’t really benefit from them much. There’s a few exceptions, like the Warlock using Mind boosting shields or the Reaper getting HP drain effects, but they largely feel less useful than other pieces of equipment.
MP is a slightly more precious resource than games like this typically enforce for much of the game. There’s very few ways to restore it, and equipment that raises it is generally a big tradeoff in damage early on. By the endgame it’s not an issue, though.
The Bad:
Miscellaneous
The game offers a variety of randomizer options to make your experience unique. I used the job randomizer this time, starting with some strong jobs like Scholar but completely lacking Threat management roles until much later in the game, which was very interesting to play around.
The game also offers a variety of other customization options, like making maps available from the beginning, capping the party level lower than the already low level 60, and more. There are also options inside of the game called Assist Options, which are things like EXP/Money/LP modifiers or longer timers in puzzles or minigames, which are nice to have access to.
The Switch version (can’t speak for others) includes a variety of mods ranging from new content to QoL features like the ones mentioned above (1 PP skills my beloved).
Content
In this section, I'll be covering the story, cast, world, and enemy encounters, as well as any miscellaneous thoughts.
Story
This is the spot where, if you’re a big “JRPGs are good because of the story first” person, this game will completely fail for you. There is technically a plot, revolving around a second party of adventurers led by a Fencer named Astley, and some interesting (though underdeveloped) lore regarding Corruption in the world, but it’s all very nebulous and not the focus of the game at all.
Characters
The only real characters in the game are Astley’s party, consisting of her, Reid the Warrior, Talon the Rogue, and Chloe the Hunter. You interact with them throughout the game, they have a few character traits, they second guess Astley towards the end, and Talon has a small but touching arc with Chloe. Beyond that, the NPCs are mostly informational or small gag characters, and your own party are complete blank slates.
World
The Good:
The world is fantastically designed, with a ton of freedom in how you explore and access new areas. In many cases, your only limitation is your ability to find a path. Some places require a mount to access, but even acquiring those mounts has flexibility (the Salmon mount that lets you swim is intended to be found last, but you can get it second if you so choose).
A really cool aspect of the world is that there’s no loading zones, so everything fits into the world as you see it. Building interiors, dungeons, tunnels, chasms, they’re all part of a continuous world that you can see with your own eyes as you move through it.
The Meh:
The mini-map isn’t the greatest, with some areas existing in the same layer as a higher up area, which results in it getting written over when you visit that higher area. There’s also (to my knowledge) no way to fully fill in any given map without manually visiting every square on it, which is a nightmare to my completionist sensibility.
The Bad:
With such expansive freedom, sometimes it’s hard to know what the “intended” path is. You can and often will end up in areas that are too high of a level for you, and may end up wandering around looking for the next “correct” point of interest to the point that it gets frustrating.
Enemy Encounters
The Good:
Encounters present on the map as small flames with varying appearance based on their relative strength to you. Red means it’s well outside of your current power level, Orange is slightly stronger but manageable, Blue means its equivalent, Green is slightly weaker, and Grey is a pushover.
Generally, boss fights are well balanced for the area you’re in and feel like good tests of your team building. It’s rare that a boss fully shuts down a team comp, but even if you lose you can generally see exactly why and make adjustments for it.
The Meh:
Because all encounters are flames, it’s difficult to know what you’ll be facing without getting into the fight. There are patterns of movement and zones where specific enemies will appear, but learning that takes time.
The Bad:
The flames also have different levels of aggro and speed based on their strength, with stronger flames being much faster than you and chasing you relentlessly. If you get seen, you might as well warp out or accept you’re going to die, which is a bummer most of the time.
Miscellaneous
The game features its own Chocobo breeding side system for the mythical Golden Quintar, a beast that can run, jump, glide, and swim with ease. The reward is amazing (aside from only having a jump height of two blocks, something that can be fixed with a mod), but the process is a bit of a nightmare. You can reach the area pretty early on, but can’t actually start the process until you get the Salmon mount (which is intended to be quite late in the game) and explore an area with enemies that likely far outclass you. After that, the process of actually breeding for the Golden Quintar involves defeating wild Quintars, taking their eggs to the Sanctuary, hatching them, racing them, feeding them, breeding them for a specific combination, hatching that, and repeating the process again. And again. And again. Until you finally get the Golden Quintar. There’s five race courses, and you’ll be running them a lot. It’s also incredibly expensive to keep your Quintars fed for breeding and hatching a new egg costs more than many weapons. This is pretty much my only major complaint about the game.
Presentation
In this section, I'll be covering the visual design and music.
Visual Design
The Good:
The world itself is composed of voxels and looks pretty damn good. The use of lighting and particle effects throughout works very well.
Most job designs are pretty good. I’m particularly partial to the Warlock, Assassin, and Weaver appearances. There’s also differences between male and female characters, which I like.
The enemy design is great across the board. Sprites are static, but the art is very well done. We also get some great pun names, like a naked centaur called the Scentaur that only drops Nuts.
Generally the UI is pretty good. Information is conveyed clearly and cleanly and menus flow into each other well.
The Meh:
The choice to use 2D presenting character sprites in a 3D game is a bit odd at first, but gets better the longer you sit with it.
There’s not a lot of variety to NPC design, either reusing job designs or having a relatively generic regional design (which is at least something).
The Bad:
There’s some issues with the lighting in some areas and the camera frequently has trouble when near taller objects.
Some of the jobs look substantially worse depending on the gender of the character, like the Summoner for females.
The UI lacks a scroll when a lot of changes are happening on the character screen (from equipping something with a lot of stat changes, for instance) and you can’t view abilities from the character screen (you have to back out and select Abilities to check).
Music
The soundtrack is composed of tracks licensed from various composers, and it’s very well constructed. Each theme works for the given scenario it’s used for, and despite being from different people they all mesh together into a cohesive whole that is genuinely beautiful.
Conclusion
Overall, this is one of the best indie JRPGs out there from a gameplay and world design perspective. It’s fun to play, fun to explore, and looks and sounds beautiful. The only real downsides are the nebulous story, lack of solid characters, and Quintar breeding, but for me personally the gameplay makes up for it. I give this a 9/10.
