CrisTales - Demo (Story)

Those of you who saw my list of games in the Switch menu to vote what game I'd cover next may have seen this demo. The demo itself got no votes, but this being a demo, it won't last long. (I'll get around to the winning game, New Super Lucky's Tale, once I get more external hard drive space, as I'm low on that.) This is CrisTales, a game that, if you ask me, should've been in the Nindies Showcase when the demo came out. But it didn't, which is a shame because this is a charming, pretty game.


I thought Earthlock was obscure, but CrisTales doesn't even show up on the YouTube list when I try to enter in which game this is! As it turns out, when there's no match, it's rejected and I have to keep it blank. And like Earthlock, which was a team from Norway who wanted to show off what they could do, same goes for CrisTales in Colombia in South America. (Hence the pun in the title. It's tales about someone named Cris, but "cristales" is the Spanish word for, well, "crystals." More on that later)


CrisTales is a JRPG at its core. Your protagonist is Crisbell, a girl at an orphanage who spots a frog wearing a top hat stealing her rose from the garden. She chases him down and learns that he is a time mage, and, once Crisbell comes into possession of time crystals, so is she. From here on out, the game's gimmick separating it from other RPGs comes into play: Where other RPGs have time-traveling mechanics, like Chrono Trigger, CrisTales has Crisbell always seeing into the past and the future wherever she goes, which is represented onscreen by the left side showing the past, the right side showing the future, and the middle, where Crisbell occupies, in the present. You'll see that the future is not in that great a shape--it's up to Crisbell to take action in the present, often using information gleaned from observing the past, to brighten up the future. (I wonder if this game had any inspiration from Sonic CD, another game with time travel anywhere and anytime you want where the goal is to restore the future.)


The game begins in medias res, starting with a battle tutorial, which I don't really deem as necessary; I think it would've been better to introduce Crisbell at the orphanage to show her humble origins. The battling itself is pretty standard turn-based battling, but with Crisbell's time-traveling applied throughout. Though you won't see it in the tutorial, she will encounter other heroes along the way, and she can combine her time powers with their skills for additional effects. After this tutorial, the story begins proper, with most of the demo involving Crisbell wandering around her home town of Narim and the nearby lake, meeting characters, and helping people through the use of the time crystals--while Crisbell herself cannot travel in time in the overworld (at least not yet), her traveling companion Matias, the frog in the top hat, can.


I personally like this game's use of 2½D--whereas most examples have 3-D graphics played mostly like a 2-D game, with limited use of the third dimension to augment the gameplay, CrisTales appears to be the rarer inversion. The gameplay itself is 3-D, but the graphics are entirely 2-D vector sprites with heavy use of parallax to appear 3-D. Some games use this (I saw a fighting game for the Dreamcast use this to make unusually advanced-looking 3-D effects that by all means the Dreamcast couldn't normally do), but CrisTales uses it to an extent I've never seen before. The result is somewhat surreal but is still pretty, and it was likely necessary for the split-screen layout to work. Also makes the whole game look like a cross between Samurai Jack and a modern Disney Channel cartoon, which is not a bad thing at all.


I'm also pretty surprised the entire game is fully voiced. There aren't voice credits in this demo, but Crisbell sounds like Cristina Vee (who would be a "Cris"), and Matias sounds like Todd Haberkorn. I could be wrong though, but that ever last NPC is voiced in every line of dialogue, no matter how insignicant, shows how ambitious the developers are. That's another reason I was surprised it didn't appear on the Showcase, considering its ambition is comparable to Raji, which was the highlight of that video.


A couple of things though: This game has a lot of loading, and they're pretty long. I hope they work that out by the full game's release. The other is the boss battle near the end of this demo: With no HP meter, the dialogue repeating, the boss showing no signs of wear or much change in strategy, and repetitive actions by Crisbell and Christopher, it's hard to tell I'm making any progress on the boss at all until it suddenly ends.


I think I'll get the full game later. When NSLT is done, this will be up for vote too. There will also be a follow-up video for the "Colosseum" mode. I'll describe that when I get there.


By the way, since this video is so long, there won't be a video for Sunday. Pokémon videos will resume on Monday.