Cris Tales Review
I think if there’s one thing the Terminator franchise has taught us, it’s that time travel looks cool but ultimately becomes a real headache. Since there’s so much that can and will change with the disruption of past events, messing around in the time stream very quickly becomes a disaster of immeasurable scale. But I think we can all admit it’s very fun to see different people and items from different times alongside each other, so I really hope people don’t stop trying to make it work. I especially hope they don’t stop trying to make it work in video games because, while it usually doesn’t make sense even by time travel standards, it tends to lead to strange and creative stories and mechanics. I hoped to get some of these stories and mechanics when I decided to review Cris Tales this week.
Cris Tales puts players in the shoes of Crisbell, an orphan left in the care of the church who, after being exposed to the magic of an enchanted stained glass window, becomes a potent time mage. Unfortunately, this puts her in the path of the deadly and mysterious Empress of Time. Suddenly, Crisbell must not only explore and expand her newfound powers of time manipulation, but also evade the minions of the temporal tyrant. Joined by an array of allies, Crisbell will travel the world, changing the past in an attempt to disrupt the foretold apocalypse brought about by the Empress’ invasion of the future.
There have been a lot video games that incorporate time travel in some way but I can’t think of any other game that uses it how Cris Tales does. The first and most noticeable is the game’s persistent view into both the past and the future. Thanks to the three-panel structure of the stained glass that gave Crisbell her powers, the game screen is divided into three parts. In the center is the present, to the left the past, and to the right the future. This has the somewhat jarring effect of constantly making the player aware what has come before and what will come to pass, unless changes are made. Being able to see characters as their younger or older selves gives the player’s decisions more weight and better fleshes out the world. The moment that made me realize how much I liked Crisbell’s altered sight was early in chapter two. Upon entering a slum, I noticed various detritus apparently floating in mid air in my vision of the future. It quickly struck me that the slum would be ruinously flooded in the future, and the revelation and accompanying fear and sadness made me realize Cris Tales had done something special.
The past and future can also be explored thanks to the assistance of Matias, an enigmatic yet dapper talking frog. Matias’ temporal travels is Cris Tales’ first stumbling block, because it’s primarily used to retrieve banal items and has the obnoxious limitation that Matias must be close to Crisbell to be deployed. If Matias moved at a convenient speed or if the message informing the player of Matias’ distance didn’t take so long to dismiss, this wouldn’t be a problem, but sadly this particular function is mostly a frustration. And it’s not the only problem I have with Cris Tales. The game uses a combat system similar to Paper Mario or the very good Bug Fables but doesn’t do as good of a job. The timing windows are very poorly signified thanks to the extravagant animations, and when I would hit perfect timing there was very little notification or fanfare, so it never felt impactful. The controls are often less than responsive outside combat as well. During my 12 hours with the game, I had moments where I would have to repeat button inputs several times or, bizarrely, the exact opposite. At one point, the game was overzealous registering my input, causing me to fail a puzzle and forcing me into combat. I don’t think I’m infallible but I’ve got a pretty good idea of when something is my fault.
The last, and possibly worst, issue I have with Cris Tales is it’s pretty boring. This isn’t a statement I thought I would be making in regards to a game about time traveling wizards but it’s unfortunately the case. The first reason for this is the game’s story and quest structure. For some reason, in a game about chronal chaos, the player is strictly required to follow events in a very specific order to the point of absurdity. I can understand some railroading, that’s standard for just about every video game, but Cris Tales takes it a step too far. The perfect example of this is a quest in chapter three where Crisbell and company need to locate a holographic projector belonging to a now dead person to open a locked diary. Knowing this person died a while ago, I believed the projector in question was likely to have been damaged in the intervening years and would not be useful in the present, so I sent Matias back in time. I quickly located the projector but was told by the game “there’s nothing of interest here” which thoroughly confounded me. It turned out that I needed to find the projector in the present and remark upon the fact that it was broken before I was allowed to retrieve it from the past. That preposterous level of strictness stunned me and almost persuaded me to quit playing entirely.
In spite of a cool mechanic, the game’s combat is similarly mundane. The basic mechanics are standard JRPG fare with a slight twist: the turn-based gameplay features two enemy fronts for players to manage. Where the game gets creative with this twist on the format is with Crisbell’s time manipulation powers. On her turn, Crisbell can send enemies on the right-hand side into the future and enemies on the left-hand side into the past. The game doesn’t specify how much time Crisbell is skipping, but it’s at least several years. As the enemies shift through time, their abilities and stats change based on their new forms, as well as suffer special effects if certain conditions are met. For example, if an enemy is poisoned and then sent forward in time, the damage that the poison would do over the course of several turns is dealt all at once. I wish there were more to say about this creative mechanic, but there isn’t, which was a huge disappointment to me. Barely any allies’ abilities interact with this time travel and no amount of age change will inflict as much damage to enemies as attacking or exploiting elemental vulnerabilities will, so I found myself rarely using Crisbell’s time abilities.
While it’s a perfectly functional, acceptable game, Cris Tales doesn’t manage to achieve the heights it appears to be aiming for. The time travel and manipulation are cool ideas that never reach their potential, and everything aside from that is boilerplate genre material. At about 12 hours of play time, I’ve completed three of the game’s five chapters and I can’t see myself going back out of boredom. I think if you can find it at a discount, there’s enough here to give Cris Tales a shot, but $40 is just too much for what the game is.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
