As I look into the recent releases in the Voice of Cards series by Square Enix, I'm reminded of a game that went even harder with a tabletop game aesthetic, but that has disappeared from public discourse since the 3DS era. That game was Level-5's Crimson Shroud, which was famous for going as far as to have the player perform in-battle RNG rolls with 3D dice manipulated via the touch screen.
In that game, you play as a group of adventurers -- Giauque, Frea and Lippi -- sent after a manuscript of religious importance. The relevance of this manuscript, as well as the lore behind the world and its people, is explained throughout the game, and while the story isn't anything to write home about, the storytelling in itself is.
The game being an homage to tabletop RPGs, everything is told in novel-style, with a narrator that follows the crew, describing their surroundings and actions in rich prose, and while, for the most part, Crimson Shroud relies only on static backgrounds and models for its visuals, it is able to tie it all together through well-timed cuts and good camerawork in order to create visually interesting cutscenes.
Crimson Shroud came out as part of the Guild01 compilation of games, developed by Level-5 in cooperation with many big names from the industry. The visual design is the work of Yasumi Matsuno, who worked on Vagrant Story and FFXII, and you can definitely see a bit of those games here. And hear them, as well, since the main composer for those games, Hitoshi Sakimoto, also created CS's soundtrack.
So how come a game with this pedigree just disappears? I can venture plenty of guesses, one of which being that while CS's presentation evokes tabletop RPGs a lot, the connection to those is surface-level at best. Virtual dice are nice, but I tend to associate tabletop RPGs with player choice and open-ended problem solving more than with physical props, and in that sense, CS leaves a lot to be desired.
It's a very railroady experience, to a point where it makes normal JRPGs feel open. To continue the story, you go from point A to point B, with maybe an optional room to visit on the way, and almost nothing in the sense of dialogue and choices. The game's systems, with its cluttered stat screens and a variety of items and magic spells, give off a feeling of depth, but the reality is that the game is too short to make most of it matter.
"But if the game is so linear", one might ask, "why does a google search show so many people getting stuck on it?". Most people I've talked to about Crimson Shroud not only have not finished it, but I was actually able to pinpoint the exact moment in which they dropped it, and this goes back to another one of CS's glaring flaws: a couple of times during the game, it decides to pull an NES on you and leave you to, one, figure out a puzzle through sheer guesswork, or two, grind items to get past a difficulty spike. In fact, there are times when it will do both at the same time.
I'll go into full (spoilery) detail into how these sections work at the end of this review, because they're so ludicrous, they're fascinating to talk about, but suffice to say, at some points in the game, you need to farm a rare drop to progress, and the game won't tell you as much as the name of either the mob or the item. It's extremely obscure, and the first time this comes up is when players will either cave and grab a guide or drop the game altogether.
This contrived design methodology also ties into the one impact you can have in the story, which is the ending. First, you must be in NG+. If NG is already a grindy mess filled with difficulty spikes, NG+ takes it up a notch, but, if you make it to the end of it all... you get the bad ending again. Unless you happen to, at very specific points in the story, revisit certain locations that otherwise have nothing on them. And solve a couple of obtuse loot-puzzles. Have fun!
To be fair, it's during the most difficult parts of the game where you can kind of make some sense out of the jumble of mechanics, strategize a bit, and for a moment, catch a glimpse of what the game could have been. Maybe if the game was more fleshed out, had more enemy/puzzle variety and let you explore more freely, it might have been one of the 3DS eShop's best offerings.
As it stands, though, apart from its staff and its audiovisual charm, I think the only reason I even remember Crimson Shroud was a thing was because of how quirky it is. It will always be the weird dice game with the crazy loot hunt that gives me a chuckle when I think about it, which maybe beats being completely forgotten, but is a bit of a dubious achievement.
Full spoilers from this point out!!.
Speaking of loot hunt though, story time! Let's talk about why people get stuck playing CS. Do note thata the following is based on years-old notes and some details might be off.
The point people get stuck in is somewhere in Chapter 2 when you reach a room made dark through magic and Frea tells you you need to find a "gift" to break the curse. That's all the info you get. It turns out, this "gift" is an item called an Obsidian Daphne, and it sometimes drops from Skeleton Mages. Skeleton Mages, however, don't spawn anywhere in the map.
You have to go to the far north of the map, where there's an encounter composed of two Skeleton Archers and one Skeleton Knight. The Knight is the biggest threat and you'd normally go for it first, but to get a Mage to spawn, you need to instead put down one of the Archers first, which will bring a reinforcement in. That reinforcement can be another Archer, or it could be a Mage.
Keep redoing that encounter and killing more Mages to get your Obsidian Daphne, which, by the way, is a normal piece of equipment whose description does not mention curses whatsoever, but you have to bring back to the dark room to illuminate it and open the path forward.
So to summarize, people get stuck and drop the game because there's a certain point where they have to farm an enemy they don't know exists, in an encounter it's not part of, for a rare drop no one knows the name of, that does what you need even though it doesn't say so. Keeping track of the amount of guesswork so far? Good -- because now we reach NG+ and the game gets serious.
There's a point in Chapter 3 where you would normally obtain a key and have to descend into a dungeon. So you don't do that, and instead go to the room you used the Obsidian Daphne in in Chapter 2, where a new Goblin enemy group now appears. If you farm those, specifically killing the Goblin Hunters to make Goblin Tanks get called into the encounter, they might drop Aphmal's Key, which opens a chest in one of the first areas of the game.
The chest gives you another key that is used in Cross of Atonement, another previously visited area, to unlock Deepwater and a boss, after which you'll find a lever that opens a gate in the surface to another new set of areas -- no, the game isn't in any of these moments telling you where to go next. A few areas and bosses later, you'll reach Tieffle's Room, where there's a locked chest.
If you backtrack to Deepwater you'll now find a key on a corpse there, with which you can open that chest, and when you head back to Tieffle's Room and open it, you get... nothing! This is the end for now, so you go back to the main quest, and complete Chapter 3 as usual. But then, in Chapter 4, when you're right in front of the door to the final boss and Giauque tells you to go in, you ignore him, turn around and visit Tieffle's Room again, for no reason.
So long as you did all the roundabout stuff in the previous chapter and opened the chest, it makes it so when your characters reenter the room now, they find a hidden passage containing a lever. Pulling it opens a passage in the room just outside of the final boss, where there's a chest, the key to which is in the path to Tieffle's Room, in an area called the Western Arcade.
The hidden passage leads to a room called the Lost Mausoleum. In there, you fight a bunch of enemies in succession, apparently to appease a demon that's hanging out there. When the battle is won, the demon leaves, and if you go and beat the final boss now, the issue that brought about the bad ending is magically fixed, and you get the good ending instead.
Did I lose you? Probably. It's a lot of backtracking and finding levers and keys to put in doors and chests, and because it all starts with an obtuse loot hunt, it's virtually impossible for anyone to find the solution by themselves. And now you know why I always get a chuckle when I think of this game.
In that game, you play as a group of adventurers -- Giauque, Frea and Lippi -- sent after a manuscript of religious importance. The relevance of this manuscript, as well as the lore behind the world and its people, is explained throughout the game, and while the story isn't anything to write home about, the storytelling in itself is.
The game being an homage to tabletop RPGs, everything is told in novel-style, with a narrator that follows the crew, describing their surroundings and actions in rich prose, and while, for the most part, Crimson Shroud relies only on static backgrounds and models for its visuals, it is able to tie it all together through well-timed cuts and good camerawork in order to create visually interesting cutscenes.
Crimson Shroud came out as part of the Guild01 compilation of games, developed by Level-5 in cooperation with many big names from the industry. The visual design is the work of Yasumi Matsuno, who worked on Vagrant Story and FFXII, and you can definitely see a bit of those games here. And hear them, as well, since the main composer for those games, Hitoshi Sakimoto, also created CS's soundtrack.
So how come a game with this pedigree just disappears? I can venture plenty of guesses, one of which being that while CS's presentation evokes tabletop RPGs a lot, the connection to those is surface-level at best. Virtual dice are nice, but I tend to associate tabletop RPGs with player choice and open-ended problem solving more than with physical props, and in that sense, CS leaves a lot to be desired.
It's a very railroady experience, to a point where it makes normal JRPGs feel open. To continue the story, you go from point A to point B, with maybe an optional room to visit on the way, and almost nothing in the sense of dialogue and choices. The game's systems, with its cluttered stat screens and a variety of items and magic spells, give off a feeling of depth, but the reality is that the game is too short to make most of it matter.
"But if the game is so linear", one might ask, "why does a google search show so many people getting stuck on it?". Most people I've talked to about Crimson Shroud not only have not finished it, but I was actually able to pinpoint the exact moment in which they dropped it, and this goes back to another one of CS's glaring flaws: a couple of times during the game, it decides to pull an NES on you and leave you to, one, figure out a puzzle through sheer guesswork, or two, grind items to get past a difficulty spike. In fact, there are times when it will do both at the same time.
I'll go into full (spoilery) detail into how these sections work at the end of this review, because they're so ludicrous, they're fascinating to talk about, but suffice to say, at some points in the game, you need to farm a rare drop to progress, and the game won't tell you as much as the name of either the mob or the item. It's extremely obscure, and the first time this comes up is when players will either cave and grab a guide or drop the game altogether.
This contrived design methodology also ties into the one impact you can have in the story, which is the ending. First, you must be in NG+. If NG is already a grindy mess filled with difficulty spikes, NG+ takes it up a notch, but, if you make it to the end of it all... you get the bad ending again. Unless you happen to, at very specific points in the story, revisit certain locations that otherwise have nothing on them. And solve a couple of obtuse loot-puzzles. Have fun!
To be fair, it's during the most difficult parts of the game where you can kind of make some sense out of the jumble of mechanics, strategize a bit, and for a moment, catch a glimpse of what the game could have been. Maybe if the game was more fleshed out, had more enemy/puzzle variety and let you explore more freely, it might have been one of the 3DS eShop's best offerings.
As it stands, though, apart from its staff and its audiovisual charm, I think the only reason I even remember Crimson Shroud was a thing was because of how quirky it is. It will always be the weird dice game with the crazy loot hunt that gives me a chuckle when I think about it, which maybe beats being completely forgotten, but is a bit of a dubious achievement.
Full spoilers from this point out!!.
Speaking of loot hunt though, story time! Let's talk about why people get stuck playing CS. Do note thata the following is based on years-old notes and some details might be off.
The point people get stuck in is somewhere in Chapter 2 when you reach a room made dark through magic and Frea tells you you need to find a "gift" to break the curse. That's all the info you get. It turns out, this "gift" is an item called an Obsidian Daphne, and it sometimes drops from Skeleton Mages. Skeleton Mages, however, don't spawn anywhere in the map.
You have to go to the far north of the map, where there's an encounter composed of two Skeleton Archers and one Skeleton Knight. The Knight is the biggest threat and you'd normally go for it first, but to get a Mage to spawn, you need to instead put down one of the Archers first, which will bring a reinforcement in. That reinforcement can be another Archer, or it could be a Mage.
Keep redoing that encounter and killing more Mages to get your Obsidian Daphne, which, by the way, is a normal piece of equipment whose description does not mention curses whatsoever, but you have to bring back to the dark room to illuminate it and open the path forward.
So to summarize, people get stuck and drop the game because there's a certain point where they have to farm an enemy they don't know exists, in an encounter it's not part of, for a rare drop no one knows the name of, that does what you need even though it doesn't say so. Keeping track of the amount of guesswork so far? Good -- because now we reach NG+ and the game gets serious.
There's a point in Chapter 3 where you would normally obtain a key and have to descend into a dungeon. So you don't do that, and instead go to the room you used the Obsidian Daphne in in Chapter 2, where a new Goblin enemy group now appears. If you farm those, specifically killing the Goblin Hunters to make Goblin Tanks get called into the encounter, they might drop Aphmal's Key, which opens a chest in one of the first areas of the game.
The chest gives you another key that is used in Cross of Atonement, another previously visited area, to unlock Deepwater and a boss, after which you'll find a lever that opens a gate in the surface to another new set of areas -- no, the game isn't in any of these moments telling you where to go next. A few areas and bosses later, you'll reach Tieffle's Room, where there's a locked chest.
If you backtrack to Deepwater you'll now find a key on a corpse there, with which you can open that chest, and when you head back to Tieffle's Room and open it, you get... nothing! This is the end for now, so you go back to the main quest, and complete Chapter 3 as usual. But then, in Chapter 4, when you're right in front of the door to the final boss and Giauque tells you to go in, you ignore him, turn around and visit Tieffle's Room again, for no reason.
So long as you did all the roundabout stuff in the previous chapter and opened the chest, it makes it so when your characters reenter the room now, they find a hidden passage containing a lever. Pulling it opens a passage in the room just outside of the final boss, where there's a chest, the key to which is in the path to Tieffle's Room, in an area called the Western Arcade.
The hidden passage leads to a room called the Lost Mausoleum. In there, you fight a bunch of enemies in succession, apparently to appease a demon that's hanging out there. When the battle is won, the demon leaves, and if you go and beat the final boss now, the issue that brought about the bad ending is magically fixed, and you get the good ending instead.
Did I lose you? Probably. It's a lot of backtracking and finding levers and keys to put in doors and chests, and because it all starts with an obtuse loot hunt, it's virtually impossible for anyone to find the solution by themselves. And now you know why I always get a chuckle when I think of this game.
2 Comments
I want to like this game but they really didn't want people to beat it did they
AllenVG
1 year ago