Nelson Schneider's Game Review of Crystalis

1997, October 1, The END DAY
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/14/13

Presentation
“Crystalis’” graphics actually hold up surprisingly well for a NES game. The most questionable design decision is why the main character (a man) has hot-pink hair and wears a hot-pink shirt… but it was the 1990s… hot-pink was in. The environments and non-player characters suffer from the limited color pallet of the NES. Most characters only have one or two colors on their sprites, and each environment is limited to a small number of similar colors. While this is okay in forest and swamp environments where vivid greens and browns complement each other, certain areas, like the volcano that is dominated by hot-pink and maroon, are just blatant eyesores. Character animation is also a bit of a sticking point, as the main character doesn’t actually have different sprites for movement, but just a single sprite that is flipped as he takes each step. Instead of walking, he looks like he has an alternating club-foot.

The music is decent, considering the limitation to 8-bit chiptunes. It’s no MIDI, but that allows the player to focus more on the composition than the sound quality. There are plenty of different tracks and, while simple, there aren’t any that become grating.

Story
“Crystalis” managed to achieve the impressive feat of being a NES game with a non-Engrish translation. Yes, there are a few (okay, more than a few) typos, and the sentence structure sometime feels overly stiff, but the entire plot of the game actually makes sense and is legible – something that few, if any NES games were able to do.

In 1997, the world ended… According to “Crystalis’” opening, as least. Knowing that the world would be ravaged by nuclear war, a team of scientists built a floating tower with the hope that one day humanity would be able to recover from the catastrophe and reach toward the goal of knowledge.

Our hero, a nameless, extremely pink young man, awakens in a stasis chamber hidden in a cave. He has no memory of his past, but soon encounters a group of wisemen who set him on a quest to retrieve 4 elemental swords, which can be combined to create the ultimate sword, Crystalis, allowing the holder access to the floating tower.

As he makes his way through the savage post-apocalyptic world filled with mutant beast-men and a few surviving villages of normal humans, our hero runs afoul of the Draygonian Empire, led by Emperor Draygon, whose obsession with power and domination has led him to seek a way into the floating tower in order to expand his power instead of his knowledge.

Gameplay
“Crystalis” is an early example of the action/RPG subgenre, with extremely poor execution of the RPG elements, but solid execution of the action/adventure elements at its core. The player directly controls the hero from a top-down perspective and can perform sword attacks with the B button. Holding B while not moving allows the hero to charge up projectiles that launch from his sword. Each sword begins with a level 1 projectile, but by finding hidden items throughout the course of the game, two more levels of projectile become available.

The A button is used to activate the hero’s equipped spell or equipped special item. The fact that the NES controller has so few buttons is rather cumbersome in “Crystalis,” as it is impossible to activate a spell while wearing the Rabbit Boots, which cause the hero to jump when the A button is pressed. Likewise, expendable healing items can be equipped one-at-a-time and are used with the B button, clashing with basic sword attacks.

The Start and Select buttons are both for accessing menus, with Start showing the hero’s stats and select showing his inventory (pressing Start while in the inventory accesses the save menu). Thus the controls for everything but basic moving and attacking are somewhat clunky and cumbersome.

The leveling system in “Crystalis” provides the hero with more HP and MP for taking damage and casting spells, respectively. The worst part of the games RPG element execution is the fact that the hero needs to be at least a specific level or higher in order to even damage tougher enemies as he progresses through the game. The maximum level is 16, which seems odd and nonsensical (obviously a programming limitation and not a conscious decision).

The hero can also collect money from each slain enemy to spend on new armor and expendable healing items. The hero never buys new weapons, as the four swords available in the game are all plot-based McGuffins that must be found as part of the game’s objectives. Annoyingly, many enemies are immune to specific elemental attacks, making it necessary to hop in-and-out of the equipment menu to switch swords in order to battle through dungeons populated by mixed groups of monsters. If the NES controller had shoulder buttons, I’m sure they would have been mapped to swapping swords!

The player’s progression through the game relies entirely on guiding the hero through towns populated with citizens, open environments and dungeons populated with monsters, and scripted story events. While the towns and battle environments are straight forward and easy to understand, some of the scripted events are just as incredibly opaque and inscrutable as one might expect from other NES games. Sometimes the game expects the player to find an item in an area with a vague description of where that item was lost, but with no visual indication of where to look. Other times, the game expects the player to jump through non-battle hoops that make little sense with terse hints. I needed to consult FAQs about 3 times to get through the game, which is fine in an era of free online FAQs… but when this game was made, those progress-impeding moments of opacity would have either resulted in paying ridiculous fees to call a Nintendo Hint Line or remaining stuck in the game for months or years (or giving up completely and playing something else).

Overall
“Crystalis” has aged surprisingly well for a NES game. The controls are solid, there’s a good amount of depth and exploration, and the game features solid environmental designs (when the color pallet isn’t inducing nausea). It not for a few moments of inscrutable opacity, “Crystalis” would be an excellent retro gaming experience.

Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5