How many Game Boy Advance units do you own?
If the answer isn’t “four,” you’re probably not going to appreciate this game
to its fullest.
Granted, only once in my life did I have the opportunity to play Crystal Chronicles with
a truly full party, but the experience still ranks on my “If I have the time and money
and three complacent friends” list.
There’s no substitute for it.
The teamwork necessary, the coordinated movement to stay within the aura of the chalice, the
trading and dealing to make sure all your members are well-equipped and battle-ready...
It’s like D&D, only Final Fantasy flavored, and running on your GameCube.
In a world filled with poisonous Miasma (and similarities to Final Fantasy IX, but those
are left as an exercise for the reader), caravans full of adventurers criss-cross the land,
searching for the magical substance known as myrrh to keep their villages safe.
Your party of up to four represent one of these caravans, travelling through dungeons
to find... trees.
Trees guarded by giant enemy crabs and Malboros and whatnot.
Defeat these bosses and you gain a drop of Myrrh for your chalice (popularly known as
the Bucket by depraved individuals with no sense of modesty), obtain three drops and
your village is safe for another year.
While you can play the game solo with a moogle maintaining your bucket, the real selling
point of the game is the multiplayer, which requires each party member to have their own
Game Boy Advance, connected to the GameCube via a link cable.
The controls are simple: the L and R buttons cycle through your customizable command list,
A performs the selected command, B interacts with objects and picks up the spoils of war,
and select allows for direct interaction with the GBA, to set commands, check inventory,
and view various other information.
It’s a multiplayer RPG, it’s just not massive or online.
It demands that the players be in the same room, and to that end demands communication
in real-time as one player might have the area map, but another has the positions of
the enemies.
Coordinated spellcasting, likewise, results in drastically increased effects, and you’ll
have to get along to transfer and trade weapon and armor recipes and the materials required
to craft them.
Through the years, your character continues to develop, through stat bonuses from items
rather than by a level system, and can even be loaded onto a memory card and transferred
to another system to take part in further adventures.
You can even play multiplayer mode alone - as I’ve had to this entire time - if you want
to do some solo adventuring or item hunting.
It’s a massive paradigm shift, bolstered by a great soundtrack and maybe the best visual
display on the ‘Cube, and one that later games bearing the Crystal Chronicles name
simply have not been able to live up to.
I don’t want to buy two more GBAs and Link Cables, but every time I brush up against
this title, that temptation rears its ugly head.