Man.

I wanted to like Crystal Project so bad, but over the course of the game it entirely burned all the goodwill it built up in the first quarter. This game puts up an incredible first impression of a beautiful vast voxel landscape, fun combat, and a straightforward yet intriguing premise of adventure. And as you go through Delende and the surrounding area to get the first three crystals, it’s a genuine blast.

The pacing gradually falls off though as the game continues, however. A few things become apparent a few hours in:
1) This is a game where you are expected to actively upgrade your armor and equipment at shops. There are weapons and armors in chests, but not really in enough abundance to avoid buying new. And shops are very expensive in this game.
2) You have to somewhat optimize your builds, which involves gaining LP, on a per class basis, to access skills on a skill tree. If you want to build hybrid characters, which the game expects you to, you have to swap around and build them from the start (you do get a miniscule amount of LP for a class if someone else in your party is in that class).
3) The level curve can be very brutal, sometimes you enter a new area where you are allegedly supposed to be in the progression, and find many of the flames are red, suggesting you aren’t at an appropriate level to fight them. You are fully expected to grind out EXP, especially as the endgame draws near.
4) Gold, EXP, and LP all accumulate very slowly.

The class system is very clearly inspired by FFV. You have a pool of classes and duplicates are allowed. Each character has a main class, that can innately use certain weapons and has a set of abilities assigned to a skill tree. You then pick a sub-class, which doesn’t affect stats or weapons, but gives you access to what you’ve unlocked for that character on that class’ skill tree. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t at all. In practice, it plays a bit more like FFIII. Some classes are very good (shaman, warlock, reaper), some are.. less good or too gimmicky to be reliable (aegis, ninja). The game fares a bit away from standard RPG menuing though, with options you’d expect like “item” and “run” being absent (the former locked behind the chemist class, the latter being a special skill of rogues and ninjas).

And this is where I’ll write a little aside, because I can’t think of anywhere else to fit this paragraph. I’m aware the dev’s purpose of making this game was to make the type of RPG he likes to play. I respect that a lot. The problem is, the audience isn’t just him, and while I presume he succeeded at that, it didn’t strike a chord for me because of just how grindy this game is. There are boosts, but if you turn them on it puts a little icon on your profile (which I did not appreciate), and even then the amount of grinding still takes quite a while. It feels like a game strongly geared towards “optimization” with no care towards how much time sink players will put into it.

As you get to Capital Sequoia, the game slowly begins “opening up” as it stops telling you where to go or what to do beyond “get crystals” – a task that gets more and more difficult without any guidance. You catch wind of a few other things. “People are going to Shoudu Province to avoid getting banished!”, as if I know where that is. A fencer you’ve bumped into a few times storms the main castle.. but we are gated by an encounter of two high level adventurers, so we cannot follow her. What’s ultra frustrating though is that the game has charm, which makes finding a new area fun for a bit, until you have to grind it out and stay there for a while.

The platforming also can be difficult at points. I’m not bad at platformers, but some of the jumps in this game are tight, especially when riding a quintar. When you’re riding a salmon, you also lose some visibility, especially when you go to the depths and are just surrounded by gray murky water. The camera is sometimes blocked by voxels as well, which can make movement difficult if there’s a wall in front of you.

Crystal Project just kind of made me sad. There’s such a great premise set up at the beginning, and it gradually falls apart. The ending is particularly bad too. The final area is pretty much a straight shot to the final boss, and the enemies there are bombs who outspeed you and cast Explode, killing one of your party members along with themselves, which wipes out two party members (unless you’re running a highly defensive build, where you can live with double digit HP). Like. What is the point of that. To waste resources? Just for a “fuck you” at the end? The story also takes a nonsense curve at the end: the person banishing everyone was.. the fencer who was trying to lead a charge against the person banishing everyone. But it’s not explained. She doesn’t do anything evil. It’s just “hey friend, let’s have a good fight” and you engage in combat.

Ultimately, I found this game petered out hard. For such a strong start and premise, it doesn’t build itself up into something epic but rather a grindy, tedious time that even its own accessibility/boosts couldn’t quite save. There are some good bones here as established by the first few hours, but the game doesn’t really make use of them, which is a shame.