Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Mar. 15th, 2004 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
same_differenceI spent the weekend in Weston-Super-Mare seeing my friend Dave and playing FF CC. Here's a review of the game (enlarged version of the one I sent to the work list):
Definitely no spoilers (there's nothing to spoil):
For those who don't know it's on the Gamecube and is designed primarily as a multiplayer game. It was fun to play but it doesn't really feel like a final fantasy game though. There is almost nonexistent plot, no random battles, no big summon creatures, none of the usual items. The only things recognisably FF are the bad guys and the spells, oh and the moogles.
The plot is roughly: the world is covered in this evil miasma that kills everything except the monsters it spawns and the moogles. A few villages have survived via use of special enormous crystals that keep the miasma at bay. There's a catch though the crystals' power must be maintained by using myrrh, which can only be collected from myrrh trees in special locations of the world (in the dungeons basically). Every year a caravan sets out from one of the villagers with a crystal chalice. A chalice can hold the myrrh and keep a small spherical area miasma free. Each tree provides about 1/3 of the myrrh you need, and only replenishes its stock once every two years. You and your friends make up the caravan from one village.
Randomly little non-cgi cut scenes occur on the world map as you meet other caravans etc. These do little to further the story (there isn't one) and while they do add a little to the feel of the world are rarely more than random distractions.
Game play consists roughly of either being in small towns talking to people or wandering around dungeons. Inside dungeons you must stay within the safe zone provided by the chalice or you start to die. Someone in your party (or a mog on single player) must carry the chalice. If you carry the chalice you move at half speed and can't do anything until you drop the chalice. So you wander around, kill bad guys, open chests, collect items and defeat the dungeon boss, get some miasma and bitch endlessly about having to carry the chalice or about the person wandering off with the chalice when your trying to kill something. Rinse repeat until you complete a year (get 3 lots of miasma) and gain access to a little more of the world.
There are also minigames, accessed by finding certain moogles and played on the GBAs. All the games are multiplayer only. I'm not sure what the games are like, we played one that was a fairly simple racing game, but seeing as it caused connection issues afterwards, we didn't try them again (by connections issues I mean one of the party wasn't registered as connected so we had to push his character model out of the village to save it, so we could reload and not have to redo lots, though that did fix the problem).
The world itself is carved up by miasma streams, and occasionally by bodies of water. To cross a body of water merely requires you to complete enough years till a boat has been built. The miasma streams are a little more complicated each stream has an element associated with it (fire, water, earth, wind) and the associated elements rotate each year. To cross a stream requires to have the right element for your chalice, though getting elements merely requires visiting a location with the right option, however its your access to area with certain elements that limits where you can go in the world. Additionally the element of your chalice has additional effects in the dungeons, for example having it set to fire reduces all fire damage to your party inside the protective bubble.
To develop your characters you collect items to improve your 3 stats (yes only 3 in an FF game) but you can only keep one thing from each dungeon you finish. The order of picking items is based upon the score you achieve based upon your individual dungeon missions. The missions vary from the easy 'do physical damage' to the downright annoying 'don't pick stuff up'. Individual dungeons can be redone as often as you like and you gain a certain amount of freedom in how you chose to collect myrrh. So you could keep doing the same dungeon over and over until you all collected one of each of the artefacts available there.
There are a couple of interesting touches for example there are only six spells (fire, thunder, blizzard, cure, life and clear) you can collect (and have to recollect them every dungeon) but if two or more people cast a spell at the same time at the same point they can generate bigger spells (thunder + thunder = thundara, blizzard + life = holy, thunder + blizzard + fire = gravija). In practise in the chaos of a fight it can be a bit difficult to do, lots of '3, 2, 1 NOW!' happen, and generally one or two people just hit things while one keeps casting cure and attack magics.
The four different character races add a little as well, meaning there's more difference between party members than just which items they chose to keep. The four races are highly stylised (the whole game has a FF9 theme to it) and the ability to chose your gender and the look of your character (four options per gender per race) adds a more personalised touched. The fact you can name your hometown does so too (we called ours Nowhere).
You can get new equipment by getting the materials, designs and making them at blacksmiths. Each race has their own specific type of armour and style of weapon. Invariably though everyone will end up fighting over who picked up which material, especially considering how much they cost to buy. Just another example of how competitiveness is injected in to a teamwork based game. Invariably how much effect this has depends on who you play with but conceivably quite a lot of animosity could be built up between players, and the game's chalice mechanic provides quite an effective way to back stab your friends.
The key feature of the game is how the control works. To play FF CC in multiplayer each player need a GBA and a GBA to GC link cable. We had three people playing with the general assertion that four would be too hectic. You use the GBA's screen to access the menu so as not to interrupt other people (your character automatically moves with the chalice and defends the entire time when your using menus). The side effect of this is that your controls consist of cycling through your actions (you can set only a limited number but get items that can increase that), and pressing A to do the action and B interact with things. Of course running three GBAs takes power, and so you use the batteries of the GBA to power it. A pair of AAs lasts 15 hours, so you could go through about 2-4 batteries per person just playing the game.
Graphically it varies from fairly good to stunning. All the character models are done very well, and the water effect and particle effects are particularly good. The dungeon looks are varied but the environments themselves aren't particularly impressive. Music wise its fairly good FF9 like music again along the lines of FF9 in style.
In summary:
All in all good fun with friends. Somewhere between Zelda and Diablo in terms on game play but not FF.
The weekend itself was good fun, it was good to see Dave and a nice distraction from the start of the week.
Definitely no spoilers (there's nothing to spoil):
For those who don't know it's on the Gamecube and is designed primarily as a multiplayer game. It was fun to play but it doesn't really feel like a final fantasy game though. There is almost nonexistent plot, no random battles, no big summon creatures, none of the usual items. The only things recognisably FF are the bad guys and the spells, oh and the moogles.
The plot is roughly: the world is covered in this evil miasma that kills everything except the monsters it spawns and the moogles. A few villages have survived via use of special enormous crystals that keep the miasma at bay. There's a catch though the crystals' power must be maintained by using myrrh, which can only be collected from myrrh trees in special locations of the world (in the dungeons basically). Every year a caravan sets out from one of the villagers with a crystal chalice. A chalice can hold the myrrh and keep a small spherical area miasma free. Each tree provides about 1/3 of the myrrh you need, and only replenishes its stock once every two years. You and your friends make up the caravan from one village.
Randomly little non-cgi cut scenes occur on the world map as you meet other caravans etc. These do little to further the story (there isn't one) and while they do add a little to the feel of the world are rarely more than random distractions.
Game play consists roughly of either being in small towns talking to people or wandering around dungeons. Inside dungeons you must stay within the safe zone provided by the chalice or you start to die. Someone in your party (or a mog on single player) must carry the chalice. If you carry the chalice you move at half speed and can't do anything until you drop the chalice. So you wander around, kill bad guys, open chests, collect items and defeat the dungeon boss, get some miasma and bitch endlessly about having to carry the chalice or about the person wandering off with the chalice when your trying to kill something. Rinse repeat until you complete a year (get 3 lots of miasma) and gain access to a little more of the world.
There are also minigames, accessed by finding certain moogles and played on the GBAs. All the games are multiplayer only. I'm not sure what the games are like, we played one that was a fairly simple racing game, but seeing as it caused connection issues afterwards, we didn't try them again (by connections issues I mean one of the party wasn't registered as connected so we had to push his character model out of the village to save it, so we could reload and not have to redo lots, though that did fix the problem).
The world itself is carved up by miasma streams, and occasionally by bodies of water. To cross a body of water merely requires you to complete enough years till a boat has been built. The miasma streams are a little more complicated each stream has an element associated with it (fire, water, earth, wind) and the associated elements rotate each year. To cross a stream requires to have the right element for your chalice, though getting elements merely requires visiting a location with the right option, however its your access to area with certain elements that limits where you can go in the world. Additionally the element of your chalice has additional effects in the dungeons, for example having it set to fire reduces all fire damage to your party inside the protective bubble.
To develop your characters you collect items to improve your 3 stats (yes only 3 in an FF game) but you can only keep one thing from each dungeon you finish. The order of picking items is based upon the score you achieve based upon your individual dungeon missions. The missions vary from the easy 'do physical damage' to the downright annoying 'don't pick stuff up'. Individual dungeons can be redone as often as you like and you gain a certain amount of freedom in how you chose to collect myrrh. So you could keep doing the same dungeon over and over until you all collected one of each of the artefacts available there.
There are a couple of interesting touches for example there are only six spells (fire, thunder, blizzard, cure, life and clear) you can collect (and have to recollect them every dungeon) but if two or more people cast a spell at the same time at the same point they can generate bigger spells (thunder + thunder = thundara, blizzard + life = holy, thunder + blizzard + fire = gravija). In practise in the chaos of a fight it can be a bit difficult to do, lots of '3, 2, 1 NOW!' happen, and generally one or two people just hit things while one keeps casting cure and attack magics.
The four different character races add a little as well, meaning there's more difference between party members than just which items they chose to keep. The four races are highly stylised (the whole game has a FF9 theme to it) and the ability to chose your gender and the look of your character (four options per gender per race) adds a more personalised touched. The fact you can name your hometown does so too (we called ours Nowhere).
You can get new equipment by getting the materials, designs and making them at blacksmiths. Each race has their own specific type of armour and style of weapon. Invariably though everyone will end up fighting over who picked up which material, especially considering how much they cost to buy. Just another example of how competitiveness is injected in to a teamwork based game. Invariably how much effect this has depends on who you play with but conceivably quite a lot of animosity could be built up between players, and the game's chalice mechanic provides quite an effective way to back stab your friends.
The key feature of the game is how the control works. To play FF CC in multiplayer each player need a GBA and a GBA to GC link cable. We had three people playing with the general assertion that four would be too hectic. You use the GBA's screen to access the menu so as not to interrupt other people (your character automatically moves with the chalice and defends the entire time when your using menus). The side effect of this is that your controls consist of cycling through your actions (you can set only a limited number but get items that can increase that), and pressing A to do the action and B interact with things. Of course running three GBAs takes power, and so you use the batteries of the GBA to power it. A pair of AAs lasts 15 hours, so you could go through about 2-4 batteries per person just playing the game.
Graphically it varies from fairly good to stunning. All the character models are done very well, and the water effect and particle effects are particularly good. The dungeon looks are varied but the environments themselves aren't particularly impressive. Music wise its fairly good FF9 like music again along the lines of FF9 in style.
In summary:
All in all good fun with friends. Somewhere between Zelda and Diablo in terms on game play but not FF.
The weekend itself was good fun, it was good to see Dave and a nice distraction from the start of the week.
