Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates (DS)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
Square-Enix

Review by Anthony

Sometimes when I see major gaming sites universally laud a game, and then find many player reviews being more critical, I’m left to wonder exactly what the cause is. In many cases, we’ve noticed that Square Enix games are almost universally free from criticism in the press, and I’ve yet to see a major review site criticize their absurd $39.99 starting price for many average-at-best DS games, even if they may thrash more reasonably priced Atlus or NIS games. It’s a good thing I picked up Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates for half the price new, or I’d have been quite the sucker for some of these absurd reviews.

Ring of Fates is not a good game. It’s a well-presented game that certainly does some things well and pushes the hardware, but it is not a good game. But for the sake of credit where credit is due, I’ll start with what’s good.

What’s good:
- The graphics and dungeon sizes clearly push the hardware. It looks good often, even if I generally dislike the pudgy, short character models in these games. Some classic FF monsters are represented here and look good with many frames of animation.
- The dungeons are interesting and held together by good control. There are a few puzzles and areas that use multiple characters’ abilities to get by, and to that extent, I appreciated it. I found navigating areas by jumping around easy and even fun at times.
- Effort was put into making it seem more than the average action RPG... the main character at least would do a stomp attack if he stood on enemies, he’d flip upward if hanging onto flying bats, and can pick up enemies and ram them into walls. Cool.

What’s neutral:
- There’s a good amount of voice acting, but with two young kids as heroes and a little whatever sprite-like creature saying “teensy weensy~” etc. whateverthecrap, it ended up annoying.
- Customizable armor sets exist for everyone and have them look like classic FF jobs... but it’s basically meaningless. It doesn’t bestow any abilities in doing so. Similarly...
- The ability to forge weapons and armor from items dropped would’ve been great if not for them putting it in such a clunky system. Monsters drop items and drop recipes and some recipes can be bought and some items can be bought but you need a certain number of recipes to make items but can augment them with items that produce random results...? I don’t feel like going into more detail except to say it’s largely trial and error (yet costs money) and could have been made much simpler.

What’s bad:
- The whole magic system in general. For all the effort they put into giving you various types of magicite and allowing you to layer more than one spell, or have various party members combine spells... enjoy using none of it! The screen view is too small to see where you’re casting from very far away, enemies attacking will interrupt your spells as you try to layer/combo them with a very slow targeting circle, and even if you spend the money to make very magic-inclined armor/weaponry, bosses can just outright resist attack spells and take no damage, assuming you have time to target and cast. Awesome.
- AI is a joke... in general, you’ll probably want to use the main character the whole game, because despite that he has a powerful five hit combo for attacking, if you leave the AI to him, he’ll run up to enemies, pause, slash once, and stop. Really? You can’t set your magically inclined party members to use magic either, since it works on expendable items, so be ready for an often useless party to be dying on you in battle.
- Game length for my one playthrough was 16 hours. When I play RPGs, I tend to very fully explore them and be levelled so as not to miss things and require a second playthrough. So, I often take a good 10 hours longer than most people show for their RPG playthroughs. Here’s a $40 RPG I did the same for and got 16 hours out of? Embarassingly short for the price and repetitive gameplay.
- The reward for beating the game is just a Hard Mode with enemies that have significantly higher HP and drop rates. If anyone genuinely wants to do that, they should be able to choose the option at the beginning, not unlock it after one playthrough.
- They add collection quests that can only be finished using 2-player local multi-cart play. No one really likes knowing they can’t finish a quest because they don’t know a friend who also bought said game and is willing to play it currently.
- The story is bad... juuust bad. Obnoxious, stereotypical characters for the most part, and it’s full of RPG clichés that have existed since NES days.

I would say that having a second player might help deal with the dreadful partner AI and allow options for robust magic casting.. but why? The story’s bad, the collection aspects end up unsatisfying, and the battles are still better won by button mashing with the hero, so why bother?

So we’re left with a game that gives you a party of four characters that it will control poorly. Then it gives you a detailed magic system that you won’t be able to use in practice. Next it gives a system of item creation that makes next to no difference and is both random and not user friendly. Finally, it ends the mess of a story in ~15 hours and rewards you with the ability to do it all again, only harder.

Sadly for Square-Enix, this game has kept me extremely wary of ever buying their DS games new or near full price again... and good luck getting me to buy a Crystal Chronicles game.