Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was originally released on the Nintendo GameCube in 2003 as not only an exclusive title, but one that made use of the console’s unique connection with the Game Boy Advance… in fact requiring it for the game’s highlighted feature, its four-player multiplayer gameplay. The game has been given the remastered treatment in 2020 on multiple platforms including Nintendo Switch, and the original version’s multiplayer has been replaced with online multiplayer, which at least in theory should make it easier to get four players into a game… in theory.

Okay, so the good news first – Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles looks pretty good, with decent textures, resolution, and framerates, and with character models that have a distinctive and memorable squat art style that’s a bit like the “SD” anime style, though in this case it’s not aiming for a comical appearance. This is paired with a decent traditional fantasy soundtrack. While there’s nothing here that’s truly mind-blowing, this remaster does a good job of making a 17 year-old game not look quite so dated.

As for the rest… this game is just a mess of poor design decisions. Some of these were in the original game, of course – I don’t think anyone wanted to be stuck “carrying the bucket”, a chalice players are forced to group around lest they take damage. In a single-player game, players get a friendly NPC character to carry this thing for them so they can actually, you know, play the game, but the need to stick with it is still present, something that doesn’t add any fun or strategy to the gameplay. There’s also the absurdly long load times, the clumsy menu screens, the overly-simple combat, the need to manually pick up any item you want to collect, the seconds of waiting needed to use any spells or distance attacks, the fact that there’s rarely much room to maneuver in battles… it feels like this game’s designers did everything possible to make it tedious and frustrating.

However, I have to put a special focus on the multiplayer in this game, which is not only absurdly user-un-friendly to set up, but which crashed on me multiple times while I tried it. I literally wasn’t able to reliably use this game’s one signature feature due to how poorly this game was designed.

It’s unfortunate that so much about Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered is a broken mess, because it does have its good qualities here too, and at the very least it’s clear that some effort was put into ensuring this game was still relevant in 2020. However, it clearly wasn’t enough work, as the result is a game that’s just not any fun to play.

tl;dr – Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered takes the classic GameCube Action-RPG, upgrades the graphics and presentation… and breaks everything else. Broken multiplayer, tedious and boring combat, terrible load times, and a slew of poor design choices that actively make the game worse… I could go on and on about all of the things that make this a terrible game. Even if you have nostalgia for the original game, you’re probably better off leaving your fond memories in the past than trying to relive them here.

Grade: D+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Winner:

Worst Port/Remake – It’s bad enough that not much was done to clean up the clunky menus, bad enough that the boring and repetitive combat wasn’t improved, bad enough that the game has absurd load times, but Square Enix couldn’t even get the core feature of the game, its multiplayer, to work right. As a result, old players will find themselves frustrated with a game that doesn’t work how they remember it, and newer players will wonder why anyone liked the game in the first place.

Runner-Up: Most Disappointing

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