I loved this game, but i don't know a single person i like that i would recomend it to. This game is a hard jrpg but a brutal platformer with some sadistic minigames. there are platform challenges that can take several minutes to re-attempt if you fall to a place that doesn't kill you and are frame/pixel perfect. this game doesn't respect you or your time.

A decent game absolutely ruined by the creator's sadistic and unnecessary approach to platforming. Massive sections where a single mistake will reset 10-15 minutes of progress await you in the end-game. Find another RPG with classes and play it instead.

99% jump puzzles, no real RPG interaction, the classes don't really interact in any meaningful way and the world is like half finished at best.

Lost interest due to traps set by designers, forcing the player to reset by ambushing them with over-leveled bosses feels like a time-waster, world also feels bland without any sort of narrative or world-building

4/10 Not impressed so far. It's a cheap, unoriginal ripoff of old school Final Fantasy... which I'd probably actually like except for 4 things that destroy the experience:

1 - Required platforming sections. Maybe wouldn't be so bad, except...

2 - You can't use the mouse for anything at all, not even camera rotation. Not even for "confirm" like you can in other similarly controlled games like Secrets of Grindea. You can't type in your character's name with the keyboard. Absolutely baffling, limiting, and infuriating controls if you're not using a controller, I guess. It's been out for years and you still can't bind a single mouse button?

3 - While the eventual class list is big, it's uninspired and the skill lists are very short and boring. There's nothing to look forward to.

4 - You can't undo options in the game's difficulty settings or assist options. I don't understand this at all... I use settings like this to adjust my game experience as I go, but making them one-way is horrible.

I really really want to give this a yes, and at currently 25 hours played it might still be a yes for a sale but this game has some serious issues.

Firstly, enemies over tuned to heck. I admittedly gave up about 15 hours in and turned on cheats so I could actually play the game without tears. I've played tons of RPG's, but rarely have a come across a game dev so insistent on preventing you from ever feeling strong. Enemies will spam aoe that either 1-shots you or close to it, on top of adding debuffs, and they will do this nearly every turn for nearly every enemy in the game.

Secondly, "exploring" is not "hardcore platforming". Someone with the ability REALLY needs to add the platforming tag to this game. I'm no stranger to platforming games. Celeste, Super Meat Boy, N Ninja, etc, etc, etc. Some of these platforming sections around what I assume is mid-end game are up there with the hardest stuff in those games. It's completely unreasonable, especially if you aren't expecting it. I haven't wanted to throw my controller in years until I unlocked "swimming" in this game and went into a certain tree. A platforming tag is necessary since you absolutely can't beat this game without killer platforming skills and an absurd amount of patience.

Buying maps should probably reveal the map. Important things on the map should be labelled automatically. Names of places should be shown on the map. None of these happen, I recommend a notebook on the side if you want to play this game seriously.

I'll probably try to play more because I hate myself, but I can't recommend anyone play this game. Do so at your own peril.

Ya know what? Some nandypandy complained about my review, so let me lambast this piece of ♥♥♥♥ game.

First, exploration is a chore; it really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is. Platforming mechanic is unforgiving and tedious garbage. The ways you can overshoot or undershoot jumps are just awful, and the amount of backtracking you have to do sometimes is just unacceptable when some jumps are just so easy to mess up. Then there's the animal companions, which completely overhaul exploration for the better, but only by mitigating the absolutely terrible ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problems of exploration.

Second, to say the puzzles and dungeons are bad is an understatement. The battles are tedious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, exploration is at its worst in dungeons, and the puzzles, dear God the puzzles. Let's talk about this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pile of ♥♥♥♥, and almost always involve very specific jumps that again force you to reset the puzzle because ♥♥♥♥ this game. One of the worst examples isn't even a puzzle so much as you finding 10 people hidden throughout an underwater area and answer each of their multiple choice questions accurately, which all involve very specific obscure details from the game world.

Third, the story. "Master of games is disappearing heroes. You must stop them." isn't a story. There are only a bare minimum of characters, the reasons people do things are dumb, and the worldbuilding just sucks in general. This game's world lore comparable in complexity to Minecraft, and it's an RPG; meditate on this.

Fourth, let's talk about the combat. It's imbalanced. Nothing scales well, so everything feels like it sucks even in the rare instances when it doesn't suck and bringing suck to the suckless. Bosses are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, most encounters are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, random encounters in many places are too powerful.

Fifth, time to talk about the class system. Taking notes from better games does not make your game good; this game takes the style, but the substance was ruined. The classes in this game are all super simplistic versions of the conventional Final Fantasy classes. This is the first game I've ever played where these classes are ♥♥♥♥, and here's a list of games that didn't ♥♥♥♥ this up: Final Fantasy I, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, Bravely Default, Bravely Second, Bravely Default II, Final Fantasy Tactics. You notice how all of them understand how to make the class system fun and rewarding, but Crystal Project does not? How? Well, allow me to elaborate. This game gives every class very few abilities, makes them hyper specific to an intended build rather than a battle role, and then traps them into that role; in other words it defines a class not based on what a class can do, but what it is restricted to doing. For example, the Samurai in FF games is based on Zenigage or whatever, who would throw coins at his enemy, and is set up to be a heavily armored attacker similar to the Knight. However, in CP, of ♥♥♥♥ its initials are CP.... damn. In Crystal Project, the Samurai is about building up the AP gauge to release a combo move, so this is what your Samurai will be doing IN EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BATTLE. Even with interesting added features, they manage to wreck the simple design of the class by pigeonholing it into a preset purpose. Crystal Project simultaneously overcomplicated Samurai and caged it at the same time. This goes for literally every class, you might think. However, there are some exceptions that especially anger me, such as the Aegis being a really crappy version of the Knight, or the Warrior being a debuffer. These changes would be less of a problem if not for the fact that Crystal Project uses these as direct reference to classic RPGs I love, but even then they would still be crap.

Lastly, there's tons of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like their offbrand Chocobos. Yeah, they made a creature that is basically Chocobos, and they even made a racing game for them and the fish, which both suck because of how this game controls. I would gladly take the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Chocobo minigames of FFVII and FFX and all their terrible tedium over this, even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Chocofinder minigame of FFVIII; this content in Crystal Project is just that bad.

Stop trying to be a Final Fantasy game. You suck at filling someone else's shoes. Do anything else, and maybe you will make a game that isn't flaming ♥♥♥♥.

I'm disappointed I didn't manage to get into this game, seeing how positively it is generally regarded.

You really, really have to love platforming not to find the exploration part frustrating. It's just an endless series of jumping puzzles with little direction and plenty of nasty punishments if you mess up (long backtrack, unwelcome fights etc.).

The combat is good and the character building is a nice riff on the old ff system. But it's mainly the boss fights that are great. The regular fights feel a little overtuned. They're doable of course, but tax your attention and resources (potions to refill mana mainly) and the combat isn't quite interesting enough to make me want to do 10 semi-risky trash fights just to traverse some zone. You can avoid lots of fights, but that relies heavily on being good at the platforming parts.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this. A whole lot of the individual parts are actually pretty good, but they manage to come together to form a massive slog, something that's really far less than the sum of its parts.

For example, individual battles are mostly fun. However, every battle is a steady drain on your very limited resources, so you have the choice of avoiding fights, meaning you'll be underpowered and lacking abilities to fight mandatory fights, or you can grind. It's frustrating, because I chose normal difficulty specifically because it said you shouldn't need to grind. That was an absolute lie. You will need to grind for abilities, and grind for cash to afford better gear and maps, and grind for consumables to sustain your party, either as drops or more money grinding to buy them. You cannot get through this game without a decent amount of grinding, regardless of what the game may tell you.

As another example, the platforming. It's pretty neat in small bouts, and when it works properly it can really lead to an open, intricate feeling world. However, a lot of the jumping paths are long and require many, many precise jumps. And don't think you can savescum these, either. When you reload a save, you're sent back to your last home point, not the point where you saved, which is unspeakably frustrating considering how large some of the maps are. I eventually reached the point where I didn't want to explore anymore because there was just so damn much platforming and it took ages to get anywhere.

Third big example, the job system. Now, I like the jobs I experienced and some of the abilities are interesting. However, many abilities on several classes just felt completely useless. Additionally, because most physical abilities are tied to a specific weapon, you are sorely limited in what abilities you can mix and match. For example, if you level a rogue, most rogue abilities are tied to using a dagger. Switch to a monk, whose abilities use staves or unarmed. Equip trickery as your second ability from the rogue. Now, you can either wield a staff or be unarmed and be able to use all the monk abilities, or waste a passive making yourself able to equip daggers, equip a dagger and be able to use most of the rogue abilities. If you do the first, you have all the monk abilities, but only can only use steal from the rogue. And for the latter, you can use the rogue abilities, but only meditate for the monk. I have no idea why this was designed like this, but it feels awful, and massively incentivizes primarily using magic classes for secondaries, as magic isn't tied to weapons.

Overall, I just got worn out by the game. I set it down to take a break, and realized that I not only had no desire to come back to it, I was really dreading playing more. So no, I can't recommend this one.

I really really wanted to like this game. But there were a few mechanical choices that really brought it down in my opinion.

The first is build variety. Having so many classes implies the idea of having a lot of room to experiment with a character's growth and build. But many martial class skills are locked to a specific weapon, rendering them useless when used as a subclass. Magic does not have this issue. It feels bad to get a new class that fits the stat spread of one of your characters and simply be unable to combine it with anything else you have.

Secondly, while the game boasts no random encounters, they are very hard to avoid on the map. Not only that, but they are rather punishing (at least on Hard mode, which I was playing on). They range between brutal to monotonous, where they are a puzzle that need to be solved and once you do, you simply repeat the same optimized process on them to victory. This isn't really an issue, but this leads into my next issue.

When you save and quit the game, you are returned to a save point check point rather than where you quit the game. Furthermore, these save points do not heal your party. Many times I found myself able to play for short session, I make it part way through a location and save and quit. Only to be ported back to the start with all of my used resources gone. I would replace them but..

Everything in the game is very very expensive. If you buy consumables, good luck getting gear upgrades. Without the gear good luck not getting trounced in fights. Even grinding for the money doesn't feel to be a viable option because the fights pay out so little compared to the costs.

The platforming is fun, but I rarely found the rewards for doing so worth it unless it was the core path to a dungeon or boss. The mount system is fun to add platforming abilities like a metroidvania, but you constantly need to swap between them and doing so through even the favorite menu is a pain.

Again, I really wanted to enjoy this game. but by the time I finished the desert it was just too much of a slog.