Crystal Project Reviews

I love it so far. It makes me feel honestly really nice to be playing it. Although I do get confused at some points of the game.

One of the best classic turn-based RPG I have ever played. Simple graphics, very fun to explore world with a variety of enemies, bosses and biomes. You mix and match abilities from different classes to create your party of 4, lots of combos to optimize for different bosses. You can choose to customize the difficulty perfect for you, I cranked it to the max and had fun creating builds for the hardest endgame bosses and their gimmicks. Multiple times I was surprised at finding out many new areas when I was expecting to be at the end of the game, also you need to actively chase down and defeat summons before they become available as skills for the summoner so 10/10

A game so good I've bought it on multiple platforms.

Gave me mixed feelings, I wish I could vote something in the middle. TLDR: It's a game with a lot of QoL (but some of it not by default) and many weird or annoying design choices that you may or may not enjoy. Exploration is the best and worst part at the same time: ·You need to explore whole areas blind before you can obtain the map. Sometimes you have to do weird things to get them and might not realise until too late. ·You can't directly get the maps for some big transition and late game areas and have to build them from parts you find instead, so you are blind until late game because you need to find the mounts and fully explore them first to get them. ·You need to unlock different mounts to fully explore the map or advance the story but it's a pain in the butt having to change them so often for basic travel. ·There is a late game mount that combines some but not all of them and you have to do a ridiculously long and annoying side quest to unlock it. ·To start battle enemies run at you very fast and you have to somehow dodge them if you don't want to fight, unless you are many levels above them (way too many to be a useful feature). They can also jump so you can't really use the environment to your advantage. ·You can't run from battle unless you have an specific skill equipped in one of your characters that by default needs another one to be used the first turn. ·Platforming can be too finicky and precise and the fixed camera works against you all the time. ·There is an auto-jump option that can help with that but you need to be constantly turning it on and off in the settings, as there is no key-bind and in some places it hurts more than helps. Combat and character building: ·There is no defend command, but you can pass turn, and see what the enemies are going to do next. ·You can't use items mid fight. ·There is an aggro system that makes it hard for your DPS characters to not die quickly because they get focused first, and the aggro changes on the fly makes it sometimes unpredictable. ·You can use aggro manipulation skills that some tank classes have but 80% of enemies kill you in 1 or 2 hits. Stat scaling is weird. ·For most casters the spells are delayed and the turn order also changes on the fly so you have to keep that in mind too. It also makes aggro manipulation harder. ·Enemies can crit you and will make you cry :_) ·Difficulty option feels like it doesn't change much? ·There are many classes and combinations available but the skills that they can use are limited by equipped weapon so you can't really combine most of them. This leaves you with only a handful of viable class combinations and half disabled skill lists. ·Lack of item variety. No accessories for half the status effects and stats. Other things: ·Story is basically non existent, so you better enjoy the gameplay. ·Post-game content that lets you enjoy your completed characters is very limited. ·There are many quality of life options available in the settings, which is fantastic, but the game feels like a chore if you play without them enabled. By default you can't teleport between save points for example. ·It has official mod tools and support which is very nice.

Very good game with tons of exploration, secret areas and just secrets overall. old-school final fantasy-like jobs and battles and good challenging battles. 100% recommend

I wish the steam review system had a 1 out of 5 stars system of some kind. This game is not perfect, it has glaring flaws, it also has outstanding highs and great traits that outshine those flaws, but I hope in this review the glaring flaws are at least acknowledged because they do hold this game back from greatness. The music, the goddamn music, man. What a hit. To everyone who knows about the LP farming method in this game.... just, what a soundtrack, right? I love the artstyle of this game, it's charming and cool at the same time. Wonderful setpieces, locations, creatures, and the classes for the most part (I will never understand why you made the Mimic look like *that*) look stunning. Mechanically, this is the best jrpg I have played. FF5 is one of if not my all time favorite game, a classic and cherished childhood memory with what used to be the best class system I have ever had the experience of using. This game's class system takes what FF5 did and runs all the way down to the touchdown line. You can turn on various options to increase replay value like mad. Randomize classes, items, monsters, even your skills. Make the game harder by changing the party size limit to whatever you like from one to four, for example. Being able to do most of the game in any order you want, at any time, works so wonderfully in this game’s favor. The mod workshop is packed with wonderful and meaningful mods, most are QoL improvements that I think should just be default to the game. The turn system is perfect, the best turn based system I have ever played. Bar none. Crystal Project is strong with how beautiful it all works.... mechanically. The way it is implemented? Holy. Fucking. Airball. This is what happens when you have one single developer having the full dominion over a project with no real voice or co-author to reign in ambition and self-understanding. While the mechanics of the game are all near-perfect, while the exploration remains it's strongest point, while the soundtrack and area design are impeccable and atmospheric (except for the final area), there are noticeable difficulty spikes littered throughout the game that then retract instantly afterwards for X amount of time. There are too many instances where certain overworld enemies are a tad too hard compared to what comes before and after their location, there are too many bosses (main and optional) that are way too overtuned for what comes before and after them, the puzzles range from absolute kindergarten level difficulty to "only the person who made this would know what to do without a guide" levels of asinine, the story (while admittedly not the focus of the game) is so laughably nothing and corny that it manages to not land with every player (I was fine with it, but a quick run on the forums and google will show you most people thought the story was lame and built up to a disappointment), and the final area..... without spoilering as much as I can, boils down to "walk down this path and encounter enemies where the gimmick is they blow up your whole party with full HP moves before you can act so I hope you equipped skills that let you survive on 1HP and just keep doing that until you reach the end." The absolute final stretch of this game was made in a single night, or at least that is how it feels. I'm not going to talk about the lore implications on the area and what that means for any previous statement, but mechanically and for US the player, it feels lazy and uninspired, and Andrew Willman should unironically strive to never again make a section of a game feel like that again. In defense of the game now, the developer put in systems to at least circumvent a lot of these problems. I’d rather the problems be solved before the final product, but these circumventions work. There are optional settings you can activate at any time, and I highly recommend you turn ALL of them on. The Enhanced Home Point should have just been how this game works, and the dev even acknowledges that most players will want to enable this option. The amount of not just backtracking but just platforming and parkour in general makes traversing to and from locations a CHORE depending on where you want to go at any given time, especially before well into the game where various fast travel shines are unlocked. Having one home point initially in the game where traveling takes so long without mounts and fast travel shrines always made no sense to me. The Healing Home Point seems like cheating at first until you realize that there comes a point where most people would just have the first save point in the game as their home point and fast travel to it for the insanely nothing priced inn. This just turns an already cheesed out mechanic into a time saver. I personally think the level limit could and should be level 99. Yes, the endgame is designed around level 60, but getting from 60+ to said 99 takes so much time that you might as well reward someone for grinding that out. Plus, unless you are minmaxing so hard you’re essentially powergaming (and if you did math and looked at graphs and charts to understand the endgame’s optimal growth rate reallocation), being level 60 will not be close enough to beating the endgame’s optional content. Easier Non-Bosses makes the regular encounters in the world a lot less “mini-boss” feeling, as the dev wanted every encounter to feel engaging and not trash-mobby. This means almost EVERY fight in the entire game will want you to at least know optimally what buttons to push or what buffs/debuffs to be using. Yet again, another downside to the dev’s complete creative control with no outside opinion, as this leads to various regular and repeating encounters sometimes leaning towards the aforementioned difficulty spikes rearing their ugly heads. This option tones that down almost completely, and makes this game more playable and feel like an actual normal video game. Custom Difficulty lets you change the difficulty setting on the fly, as normally it is set at save creation. This lets you change the difficulty down to Easy during another difficulty spike moment, then change it back to Normal once you’ve gone past that stuff. Skip Minigames is honestly up to you, I actually have this one remain off myself, but it lets you get around really dumb rubberbanding npc races so bad they make Double Dash look fair and balanced (no, they’re actually very very bad. I just can stomach them I guess?) Extend Timers does not matter except for TWO dungeons in particular. The amount of time the game gives you to complete the mechanic in time requires you to basically be perfect with almost no margin of error. Ironically enough, the “Extend Timers” option makes the game feel actually well-tuned and balance, since the extra time it does give you is not a whole lot and makes it feel like this should have been the original setting. The Boost EXP/LXP/Gold just lets the game go by at a “I have a job” pace, so don’t be afraid to turn them on. But outside of all that yeah, great game. 4/5, and I mean that genuinely. Half a star is taken away by the random spikes in difficulty alone. The creator of this game clearly wanted to make their dream game, their idea of an ideal and perfect game. They set out to make this game for them, and I think they completely nailed it and hit it out of the park. They did indeed make the game they wanted to make for themselves. The problem comes when you realize not everyone wants to play their dream game, and most people are going to have the exact same issues with their dream game. It’s just not *our* dream game. And it doesn’t have to be, but I think a lot of people who are fans of this game online need to realize that it still means it ain’t our dream game. Pretty close though.

It's just fun. If you want a game with lots of freedom and deep combat that feels like the fever dream of a FF3/FF5 fan, then this is a game I think you'll love. If you want a deep story...it doesn't really have that, but there's a little something here that pops up from time to time. Really this game is about the exploration, the fights, tinkering with your party's builds, and even some solid laughs. Sometimes a game just clicks for you, and for me this is one of those games. Plus it's super inexpensive and has mod support! It's great!

I'm a huge fan of Final Fantasy 5, and Crystal Project scratches that itch for me better than any other game. Tons of classes to play around with, and they all have their own skill trees so you can prioritize the order they learn abilities. (I only have 12 minutes in the game because I played through it on console. However, since it is such a great game I look forward to playing through it again on Steam.)

Deceptively deep combat system and great exploration mechanics and rewards. Some of the endgame stuff has a bit more friction than I'd like (like the golden quintar process), but that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying this game.

amazing game, long and difficult. if you want good JRPG, pick this one up. worth the 14 dollars for sure.