October 13, 2006
Crystalis
Current status: Not on the virtual console
Anyone who was a fan of the Final Fantasy series up through the Playstation will remember that the biggest problem with Final Fantasy 8 was that it wasn’t Final Fantasy 7. FF8 was a fantastic game, that much is clear now, but the hype of the massive fan base of the predecessor set the bar so high that it took years for it to gain the praise it deserved. Although games in the NES era couldn’t match the numbers of today’s games, Crystalis met a similar fate on a much smaller scale. While there are many fans of this game even today, Crystalis will never be able to change the fact that it is neither Final Fantasy nor The Legend of Zelda.
It’s hard to determine exactly why this game did not achieve the popularity of its illustrious predecessors. It did meet success initially, but it quickly fell off of the gaming radar. Some attribute this to the fact that Nintendo Power magazine chose to focus instead on another RPG, Star Tropics, for their full walkthrough sections at the time; another factor may be the release of the Super Nintendo in the same year.
In Crystalis, one plays the role of a messiah who has awakened to save the world from roaming monsters and a powerful floating fortress by gathering together four elemental swords. The swords will combine to form Crystalis, a powerful weapon that the player must use to defeat the game’s final enemy. It combines the action rpg style of The Legend of Zelda and character advances similar to the destined-to-become-standard Final Fantasy series.
Recommendation: Unfortunately, the repetitive manner of character advancement may have become a bit dated for mainstream approval. On the other hand, the success of MMORPGs suggest that players are still as perfectly willing to grind mindless, innumerable enemies as they were in the NES era. Even so, while I would personally love to see this game return, it would probably have to get in line behind many more popular games of the same genre.
