A few months ago I was browsing Amazon and came upon a cool looking game for the Nintendo Switch. Crystal Crisis is a crossover puzzle fighting game similar to Capcom's classic Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. While Puzzle Fighter utilized characters from Street Fighter and Darkstalkers, Crystal Crisis has an array of characters from Nicalis who developed and published the game. To me, Nicalis falls into the same niche as Atlus and Nippon Ichi Software, Japanese companies that focus on anime-styled RPGs with cutesy designs. In my experience all three of the companies have a tendency to raise design above gameplay and mechanics. That doesn't mean that these companies are bad; I don't think so. I actually buy a lot of their games. It does create things like Crystal Crisis however.
The cover art for Crystal Crisis looks great. I love the coloring on the characters and the game's logo. I really like that the logo has that 80s/90s cartoon feel; it reminds me of the bizarre toyline Savage Mondo Blitzers. The cover art attracted my interest in Crystal Crisis first; what I discovered afterwards sealed the deal for me.
Graphically, Crystal Crisis does not live up to the cover art. The in-game graphics are okay, but they aren't anything special. In fact, they're not even particularly current. I like the chibi designs of the various characters from Cave Story's Curly Brace to Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy to Johnny Turbo, mascot of the TurboGrafx-16, but the characters look like something from a PS3 game or possibly a high-end PS2 game (Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King). The level designs are decent and do push the tech beyond PS2-era stuff, but I find most of them kind of unoffensive and, well, in the background. Some small details even appear flat or blurry. I think a big contributor to my neutrality to the stages comes partially because I don't know a ton about these characters or settings. I was excited about Astro Boy, Black Jack, and a few others, but I didn't know anything about 1001 Spikes or Hydra Castle Labyrinth. I'll talk more about that later, but suffice it to say that the graphics may appear somewhat middling for many.
Soundwise, Crystal Crisis is actually pretty good. Many of the songs come from the games these characters are from and sound great. The sound effects are pretty good too. I find the Japanese voices, without subtitles, for many of the characters kind of strange though. Nicalis is an American company; having this Japanese stuff going on just feels hokey and makes it harder to connect with some of these characters since I don't know what they are saying. It is cool to have Peter Cullen as the narrator though.
As for the actual gameplay, Crystal Crisis is fun. It's also a pastiche of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Both games are fun, but both games have the same gameplay. Players select from different characters with different attack patterns (which colors of blocks will drop on the opponent) and then battle it out by matching colored blocks like in Puyo Puyo. Blocks are shattered by a "spark crystal" or "crash gem" which appears alongside the blocks. Shattering larger blocks sends more damage over to your opponent in the form of countdown blocks that only take up space until a number of blocks have been dropped on that side. The difference with Crystal Crisis is it introduces the ability to wrap gems around from one edge to the other and the capability of using super moves. Breaking crystals fills up your characters super bar, usually a three-piece affair, that then allows you to use attack or defense moves. These moves are really fun, but I found a few characters to have vastly superior options to others.
Playing as Quote and being able to drop extra blocks on my opponents field feels vastly superior to Knight's ability to give my opponent some off-color blocks to mess up their already formed crystals. Knight is an example of a very weird character. They went for a defensive playstyle, one that focuses on responding to the opponent's actions throughout the match. Unfortunately, his options are just weak for all that trouble, and the opponent often has solutions. Some characters can rotate blocks back into place or change the colors of ones already on the field. This basically negates his attack entirely. For defense, Knight can change incoming countdown crystals to count from three instead of five. This works for a short number of turns (drops) based on how many levels of power you used (1-3). The thing is, the opponent can just stay away from breaking crystals in this timeframe while you then have to try to not take as many turns as you can to keep the defense up. This power is best used when crystals are on the way, requiring the player to look very closely at the opponent's grid to watch for things that are about to break. For all of this trouble, one could just use Johnny Turbo, who can double or triple the countdown speed of countdown blocks, or Curly Brace, who can just outright destroy them.
This unbalance is everywhere along with other small flaws. The biggest to me is the lack of story elements beyond the most basic. I'm not expecting a huge epic like Final Fantasy (I'm glad that's not here actually), but I also expect something equivalent to Capcom's games with their short cutscenes at the start and end of a playthrough with a character. It's especially important here, as these characters are not household names like Ryu and Ken were back in 1996. Most gamers will know The Binding of Isaac and many will know Cave Story, but how many have played The Tempura of the Dead or Akuji the Demon? Having some little story elements, even more between match smacktalk, would give me a glance into who these characters are. Even the story mode lacks a story beyond "stop the bad guys", though I couldn't tell you what bad things they are actually doing. When the game does cutscenes, they have a great animated feel too, so it hurts to see these so underutilized. The spark crystal system itself is a bit annoying, as it basically comes down to luck. You can go stretches without any way to break your crystals while your opponent sends a rain of brightly colored detritus down upon you. This was also a problem in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The developers had the chance to fix this here, but it remains the same. Lastly, I also encountered a bug while playing that crashed the game after a match. I hope that this last issue will be fixed. I think it will.
Crystal Crisis is fun to play with the stronger characters, and it does have a wealth of modes to play. With tag-team mode, survival mode, versus mode (both local and online), inline mode (removes spark crystals), there's always something to do. It even has a colorblind mode for colorblind gamers, and tons of concept art to view. If Nicalis had taken the extra effort in additional ways like to give each character more personality, more backstory, and more balance, Crystal Crisis would be really great. Right now, it's got some imperfections that lower the value just enough.
Crystal Crisis receives a Neutral.
The cover art for Crystal Crisis looks great. I love the coloring on the characters and the game's logo. I really like that the logo has that 80s/90s cartoon feel; it reminds me of the bizarre toyline Savage Mondo Blitzers. The cover art attracted my interest in Crystal Crisis first; what I discovered afterwards sealed the deal for me.
Graphically, Crystal Crisis does not live up to the cover art. The in-game graphics are okay, but they aren't anything special. In fact, they're not even particularly current. I like the chibi designs of the various characters from Cave Story's Curly Brace to Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy to Johnny Turbo, mascot of the TurboGrafx-16, but the characters look like something from a PS3 game or possibly a high-end PS2 game (Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King). The level designs are decent and do push the tech beyond PS2-era stuff, but I find most of them kind of unoffensive and, well, in the background. Some small details even appear flat or blurry. I think a big contributor to my neutrality to the stages comes partially because I don't know a ton about these characters or settings. I was excited about Astro Boy, Black Jack, and a few others, but I didn't know anything about 1001 Spikes or Hydra Castle Labyrinth. I'll talk more about that later, but suffice it to say that the graphics may appear somewhat middling for many.
Soundwise, Crystal Crisis is actually pretty good. Many of the songs come from the games these characters are from and sound great. The sound effects are pretty good too. I find the Japanese voices, without subtitles, for many of the characters kind of strange though. Nicalis is an American company; having this Japanese stuff going on just feels hokey and makes it harder to connect with some of these characters since I don't know what they are saying. It is cool to have Peter Cullen as the narrator though.
As for the actual gameplay, Crystal Crisis is fun. It's also a pastiche of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Both games are fun, but both games have the same gameplay. Players select from different characters with different attack patterns (which colors of blocks will drop on the opponent) and then battle it out by matching colored blocks like in Puyo Puyo. Blocks are shattered by a "spark crystal" or "crash gem" which appears alongside the blocks. Shattering larger blocks sends more damage over to your opponent in the form of countdown blocks that only take up space until a number of blocks have been dropped on that side. The difference with Crystal Crisis is it introduces the ability to wrap gems around from one edge to the other and the capability of using super moves. Breaking crystals fills up your characters super bar, usually a three-piece affair, that then allows you to use attack or defense moves. These moves are really fun, but I found a few characters to have vastly superior options to others.
Playing as Quote and being able to drop extra blocks on my opponents field feels vastly superior to Knight's ability to give my opponent some off-color blocks to mess up their already formed crystals. Knight is an example of a very weird character. They went for a defensive playstyle, one that focuses on responding to the opponent's actions throughout the match. Unfortunately, his options are just weak for all that trouble, and the opponent often has solutions. Some characters can rotate blocks back into place or change the colors of ones already on the field. This basically negates his attack entirely. For defense, Knight can change incoming countdown crystals to count from three instead of five. This works for a short number of turns (drops) based on how many levels of power you used (1-3). The thing is, the opponent can just stay away from breaking crystals in this timeframe while you then have to try to not take as many turns as you can to keep the defense up. This power is best used when crystals are on the way, requiring the player to look very closely at the opponent's grid to watch for things that are about to break. For all of this trouble, one could just use Johnny Turbo, who can double or triple the countdown speed of countdown blocks, or Curly Brace, who can just outright destroy them.
This unbalance is everywhere along with other small flaws. The biggest to me is the lack of story elements beyond the most basic. I'm not expecting a huge epic like Final Fantasy (I'm glad that's not here actually), but I also expect something equivalent to Capcom's games with their short cutscenes at the start and end of a playthrough with a character. It's especially important here, as these characters are not household names like Ryu and Ken were back in 1996. Most gamers will know The Binding of Isaac and many will know Cave Story, but how many have played The Tempura of the Dead or Akuji the Demon? Having some little story elements, even more between match smacktalk, would give me a glance into who these characters are. Even the story mode lacks a story beyond "stop the bad guys", though I couldn't tell you what bad things they are actually doing. When the game does cutscenes, they have a great animated feel too, so it hurts to see these so underutilized. The spark crystal system itself is a bit annoying, as it basically comes down to luck. You can go stretches without any way to break your crystals while your opponent sends a rain of brightly colored detritus down upon you. This was also a problem in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The developers had the chance to fix this here, but it remains the same. Lastly, I also encountered a bug while playing that crashed the game after a match. I hope that this last issue will be fixed. I think it will.
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| This shouldn't be the ending scene of anything |
Crystal Crisis receives a Neutral.
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