Legends of Crystal Steam Charts & Stats

Constant crashing and the broken menus and controller settings makes game impossible to finish.

"It's a pity, but as a player, sometimes you just gotta cut your losses." This was the opening line of my original review - and I should have heeded my own advice. After many more (wasted) hours, my verdict remains the same: The good gameplay can't make up for the atrocious story/script, the many bugs and the frequent crashes. The game seems to offer a lot of content, adequate dungeon design/mapping and a lot of interesting skills to use during combat. Sadly, the game suffers from frequent random crashes on non-high-end PCs (even on the lowest option settings, e.g. without animated tiles), especially before/after combat and during map transitions (and as an added "bonus", each crash completely resets the option settings). Without auto-save or save anywhere features being available, these crashes make the game unplayable for me. Although the developer pushed an update, seemingly addressing this issue, it didn't help at all on my side. As a consequence, I closed and restarted the game every half-hour by myself (which, of course, still reset the options every time), and during my grinding sessions near save crystals, I saved the game after every battle. I thought having to do this would be a thing of the past after the early era of RPG Maker VX (Ace) games in which battles frequently crashed the game, and I'm sure the developer hasn't yet exhausted all of RPG Maker MZ's options to alleviate the issue. In all honesty, though, the crashes were just the final nail in the coffin. The worst offender is the script, which includes the main story in general as well as all dialogues. Not only are the dialogues cringe-worthily bad, the script is littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Commas are mostly absent, which leads to a lot of "Let's eat grandpa" moments, and for whatever reason the developer couldn't be bothered to finish sentences by setting a period at the end. I've played my fair share of amateurish commercial (RPG Maker) JRPGs, but I can't remember having ever encountered a worse script (during a game's beginning sections). I'm not a native English speaker, which makes me somewhat more tolerant and understanding, but this game's script is simply unacceptable for a commercially released game. The developer apparently isn't a native English speaker, too, so it would be foolish to expect great improvements in this department. Furthermore, it doesn't help that the story - something about the power of the elemental crystals - has been told a million times in the past, and the one-dimensional, not logically acting characters aren't able to elevate this simple setting. Many bugs and inconsistencies convey the impression that this game isn't in a very polished state yet. The quest log seems to be mostly useless, and during my now abandoned playthrough, it stopped working completely early on during chapter 3. While this issue wouldn't be such a great deal per se, the story often times doesn't make it very clear where the player is supposed to go. On the other hand, it isn't really rocket science to advance the story, so at least experienced players will be able to manage. The battle system is, without a doubt, this game's highlight. Skills are varied and can be leveled up through usage, and summoning beasts to unleash even more devastating skills is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the game features (limited) level-scaling (for random encounters), which makes random encounters a chore in many locations. In terms of cost-benefit ratio, one early game location was far superior for a long time, but powerleveling there certainly didn't do me much good, since it made random encounters later on even more difficult and unrewarding. Boss encounters don't seem to be affected by the level-scaling, but they take all your overpowered skills into consideration, which means bosses take forever to beat nonetheless. Another drawback resulting from my powerleveling was the availability of equipment, which seems to be related to the protagonist's level rather than story advancement. If you want to fill out the game's encyclopedia, you need to buy/obtain everything anyway, but grinding in my favorite early-game location didn't yield enough money, so I couldn't afford the best equipment when it became available, even though I would have needed it because of the level-scaling. So yeah, this game design certainly doesn't work for a stubborn player like me. Anyway, there's a lot to do for completionists (in theory), which is usually a good thing. Beware, though, that (certain?) treasure chests seem to contain randomized loot - a mechanic that I hate as much as most other mechanics with "randomized" in their names. Enemies only seem to drop "treasure chests" (instead of equipment), by the way, which - you probably already guessed it - can be opened to obtain randomized loot. While I'm not averse to gacha mechanics despite their random nature, it seems a bit lazy to rely solely on them. If your PC is potent enough (so that you don't have to worry about performance-related crashes) and if you can bear with the horrendous story/script and the multitude of bugs/inconsistencies, give the game a try, because battles and dungeons/areas seem to be competently designed. Since I don't want to continue my playthrough (mostly because of the crashes) and can't ignore the abysmal script, though, I still can't in good conscience recommend this game.