I want to like Cris Tales more than I did. It has the foundation of something that could have been great but fails to deliver on almost every aspect.

The gameplay had the potential to be fun and creative with its time travel gimmicks but the tutorial battle is as complex as the game ever gets with the time travel mechanics. In the end it's relegated to a few creative spells and quick and easy puzzle solving.

The barebones of the story is fine. It's unimaginative in parts and overstayed its welcome in the end with all the backtracking but the biggest issue is that the writing is bland, cheesy and much too condensed. The characters never have room to grow aside from maybe K (and for that smidgen of character development alone he's my favourite character). The story never managed to make me really care about anything because it didn't manage to get me invested, a failure of storytelling and character development.

The soundtrack is fine with quite a few nice tracks and the art style is gorgeous, but it feels like they spent their entire budget on art and didn't focus enough on the rest of the game. Cris Tales has good ideas and it's frustrating to see the potential in it that is never realized. I went through the entire game hoping it would get better but it never did.