Is your heart still asleep?
Fine. It can wait for a bit. My wish doesn't have to reach you just yet. Not until you wake up.
Whether yesterday was unhappy. Or today is unhappy. Or tomorrow will be unhappy...
For every tear that is shed... rather, because tears will be shed, there may still be smiles in the future.
There's no law that enforces kindness in the world. The world is empty. The world is unreasonable. But, however, because of that...
You must give meaning to your tears through your will. You must give meaning to the sadness and pain you endure. Because it'll be unrequited. Because it is unfair.
Most importantly, use your tears to smile. I'm sure your future will be wonderful.
So give meaning to the tears.
You get exactly one paragraph on mechanics from me: It's repetitive cornmeal. I don't care HOW much of a mechanics-focused action game or RPG labber you think you are: You aren't finding anything special here. Trust me, I tried. All you need to know is that everything works in a (to my experience) bug-free manner, but the actual design is still frustrating (such as attacks not properly snapping to enemies and with imprecise controls). You spend way more time in repetitive dungeon-crawling than the systems' depth support, so if you play this game, you are doing so for experience of playing the story on offer. Hell, I even recommend setting the difficulty to easy so you spend less time on the dungeon crawls.
That aside, let's talk about other stuff.
There's no way I can be objective or measured about this: Crystar is one of my favorite games of all time because of literally everything besides the act of playing it, and that's saying something coming from me, someone who's about gameplay first and foremost always. The game presents a compelling story about death, grief, mourning, and how sorrow can transform us for better or worse. And it does so with fleshed-out characters that never feel too far into anime stereotype territory and a plot that isn't afraid to do great and terrible things to them. What's more, the plot is both complicated and sensible, with threads being resolved in intuitive ways full of twists that don't even feel like ass-pulls (at least for the bits that really matter).
This is to say nothing of the presentation: The English voice dub is excellent, so much so that I hesitate to think of playing it in Japanese on my next playthrough (especially when the game has that age-old problem of not translating combat dialogue and whatnot, which I feel gives a degree of context and personality to the characters). Brianna Knickerbocker absolutely kills the role as the main character Rei Hatada, with every sigh, gasp, sniffle, sob, and line delivery perfectly capturing how she's feeling at every moment. The rest of the cast does some real heavy lifting too.
The Sakuzyo soundtrack is also a delight, delivering tracks ranging from sadly beautiful to exciting when the time calls for it. And the art is just genuinely gorgeous. Both these things especially come together in Rei's room, the main menu that may seriously be my favorite main menu in video games now, presenting little "slideshow" vignettes of what a depressed, heartbroken Rei does at home in her room all day.
As someone experiencing a great deal of grief right now myself, this game just hits different, now. All its themes of depression and survivor's guilt and grief transforming us in great and terrible ways speak to me on a visceral level that I appreciated before, but not quite as much as I do now with intimate knowledge of how it feels. Being brutally honest, I was sobbing my eyes out during the credits, even though I already knew how the story went from my first playthrough going on almost 4 years ago, now.
I know this is all honestly a bunch of word salad, me blubbering about how much I love this game without actually getting into specifics, and I'm sorry about that. I'm truly not at my best right now. But I had to get something out there the same day I beat the game: Crystar is a rare example of a game that comes around once in a blue moon, seemingly nothing special on the surface, but truly one of the most magical experiences you can have while playing a video game that's less than stellar to play. I used to tell people I can't recommend it to anyone, but now I instead say:
Give it a shot. You might find something special here.
Fine. It can wait for a bit. My wish doesn't have to reach you just yet. Not until you wake up.
Whether yesterday was unhappy. Or today is unhappy. Or tomorrow will be unhappy...
For every tear that is shed... rather, because tears will be shed, there may still be smiles in the future.
There's no law that enforces kindness in the world. The world is empty. The world is unreasonable. But, however, because of that...
You must give meaning to your tears through your will. You must give meaning to the sadness and pain you endure. Because it'll be unrequited. Because it is unfair.
Most importantly, use your tears to smile. I'm sure your future will be wonderful.
So give meaning to the tears.
You get exactly one paragraph on mechanics from me: It's repetitive cornmeal. I don't care HOW much of a mechanics-focused action game or RPG labber you think you are: You aren't finding anything special here. Trust me, I tried. All you need to know is that everything works in a (to my experience) bug-free manner, but the actual design is still frustrating (such as attacks not properly snapping to enemies and with imprecise controls). You spend way more time in repetitive dungeon-crawling than the systems' depth support, so if you play this game, you are doing so for experience of playing the story on offer. Hell, I even recommend setting the difficulty to easy so you spend less time on the dungeon crawls.
That aside, let's talk about other stuff.
There's no way I can be objective or measured about this: Crystar is one of my favorite games of all time because of literally everything besides the act of playing it, and that's saying something coming from me, someone who's about gameplay first and foremost always. The game presents a compelling story about death, grief, mourning, and how sorrow can transform us for better or worse. And it does so with fleshed-out characters that never feel too far into anime stereotype territory and a plot that isn't afraid to do great and terrible things to them. What's more, the plot is both complicated and sensible, with threads being resolved in intuitive ways full of twists that don't even feel like ass-pulls (at least for the bits that really matter).
This is to say nothing of the presentation: The English voice dub is excellent, so much so that I hesitate to think of playing it in Japanese on my next playthrough (especially when the game has that age-old problem of not translating combat dialogue and whatnot, which I feel gives a degree of context and personality to the characters). Brianna Knickerbocker absolutely kills the role as the main character Rei Hatada, with every sigh, gasp, sniffle, sob, and line delivery perfectly capturing how she's feeling at every moment. The rest of the cast does some real heavy lifting too.
The Sakuzyo soundtrack is also a delight, delivering tracks ranging from sadly beautiful to exciting when the time calls for it. And the art is just genuinely gorgeous. Both these things especially come together in Rei's room, the main menu that may seriously be my favorite main menu in video games now, presenting little "slideshow" vignettes of what a depressed, heartbroken Rei does at home in her room all day.
As someone experiencing a great deal of grief right now myself, this game just hits different, now. All its themes of depression and survivor's guilt and grief transforming us in great and terrible ways speak to me on a visceral level that I appreciated before, but not quite as much as I do now with intimate knowledge of how it feels. Being brutally honest, I was sobbing my eyes out during the credits, even though I already knew how the story went from my first playthrough going on almost 4 years ago, now.
I know this is all honestly a bunch of word salad, me blubbering about how much I love this game without actually getting into specifics, and I'm sorry about that. I'm truly not at my best right now. But I had to get something out there the same day I beat the game: Crystar is a rare example of a game that comes around once in a blue moon, seemingly nothing special on the surface, but truly one of the most magical experiences you can have while playing a video game that's less than stellar to play. I used to tell people I can't recommend it to anyone, but now I instead say:
Give it a shot. You might find something special here.