As expected, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a Final Fantasy game

only in name. With a completely new action based system and very little

in common with the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy: Crystal

Chronicle is shaping up to be an exciting and innovative action game

from producer Akitoshi Kawazu, who has previously worked on the SaGa and Seiken Densetsu series. The premise of the Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is that the world has been covered

with a deadly smog, and that the only item that can repel this smog is

an item known as a Crystal Cage, which your party happens to possess.

Your party cannot survive within the smog, so they must stick together

as a result. Because FF:CC is a multiplayer game, and only one

character can carry the Crystal Cage, that essentially makes that player

the leader.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles banks the majority of its gameplay on

the notion of multiplayer party interaction. The game is designed for

four players to play on the same screen at once (there is no

split-screen, due to the smog element), and in an effort to make players

identify with their characters, you are able to choose from a variety of

characters, and even specify a gender. These characters of course, all

have their own unique characteristics and abilities based on one of four

classes. Other multiplayer gameplay elements include the ability to trade

and share information with other players, by using the Game Boy Advance

as the controller. Each player is granted unique information on his or her GBA screen, such as an area map or a boss’s health meter. The players must work together to pool this information, but you can also hide info for personal gain; it’s unclear exactly what you can gain from being selfish though.

Crystal Chronicles can be played either by yourself or with up to four players; the story remains the same either way, but the difficulty automatically adjusts for the number of people playing. In keeping with the game’s action focus, the story is divided up into many small missions. Presumably players can join up or drop out of the game between missions. All of the cinema scenes are presented in real-time…there are no FMV sequences, as have become practically synonymous with the Final Fantasy series since its move to disc-based systems. In another odd twist, the GameCube controller can be used if just one player is on the quest, but with multiple players, everyone must use a Game Boy Advance.

Battle, like the rest of the game, is completely real-time and very much action-based. Players can use physical attacks and even charge up attacks like in Secret of Mana. Enemies will drop magic stones known as Magicite that

can be used by characters to learn new spells. Magicite may also be hidden around the world, ready for the taking if you can find it. This element might create fierce competition among party members for the

Magicite, or it might create an element of party sharing, where players

will decide among themselves who should get what spells. Once spells have been obtained, they can be used in battle. Unlike pretty much every Final Fantasy game for the past decade, there are no summons in Crystal Chronicles. However, in a nod to Square’s classic Chrono Trigger, players can combine their attacks and magic to form combo attacks…perhaps even pooling the actions of all four players into one giant “Quadruple Tech”. Unlike Chrono Trigger, these combo attacks are more skill based and depend on timing and placement, which of course must be coordinated among the different players.

Crystal Chronicles aims to be a large game, approximately thirty hours if you play through from start to finish, and longer if you take the time to collect items and complete sub-quests along the way. The environments range from towns to deserts, plains to volcanoes. The story does not appear to be heavily based on the characters you use, but there is some character development in the sense that you gain new abilities from the Magicite and other items throughout the game.

This unusual new Final Fantasy title does not intend to be as dramatic as the core series, but its creators hope that new fans will be sucked in by the game’s accessibility and unique features. It uses a strong fantasy art style, much like the older FF titles that appeared on Nintendo’s systems. Music is being created by the composer for Final Fantasy XI, the online title for PS2 and PC. Sadly, Crystal Chronicles will not support Dolby Pro Logic II for surround sound. Nintendo fans will be very happy to learn that Shigeru Miyamoto has been keeping an eye on this project and has offered plenty of advice for the development team, although Final Fantasy’s legendary creator Sakaguchi-san has yet to really see the game for himself.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles will be fully playable at E3 next week. We’ll have more info and lots of impressions at that time.

Last updated: 11/11/2002

If you’ve never played a Final Fantasy game, hello and welcome to the world of gaming. You’ve got a lot to learn. The game that once saved a dying SquareSoft has turned into one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time, with a whopping eleven sequential titles released in Japan to date... and that’s not including the dozens of spin-off games. The series was a mainstay on Nintendo’s systems through the first six games, and then Square famously fled to the PlayStation’s roomy CD-ROM format to continue the series. Now, thanks to corporate loopholes and other acts of God, Final Fantasy is returning to a Nintendo platform.

Crystal Chronicles is not the next “true” Final Fantasy game, and that fact is precisely why it’s difficult to say what the game will be like at this point. In the main series, Square is practically required by tradition and fan expectations to include or at least refer to numerous characters, locations, enemies, features, etc. In a spin-off, much of that obligation is thrown out the window, especially when Square is working with a GameCube audience that may not be so familiar with the series.

So here are the straight facts, as revealed by Square’s comments and video footage of the game. Crystal Chronicles is a fantasy-themed game with characters that battle monsters with swords. It supports the GC-GBA link cable and up to four simultaneous players. The connectivity is designed so that players must verbally communicate with each other in order to work as a team, i.e. critical status information is displayed on each player’s GBA screen rather than on the television.

That’s it. For a game announced more than six months ago and scheduled for release in Japan in even less time, there is very, very little solid information on Crystal Chronicles. So, let the speculation begin!

First, the small amount of available video footage seems to indicate that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (FFCC from here on) will take place in real-time, which would be a significant departure from the main Final Fantasy series. It also looks like the game’s environments will be fully polygonal with some kind of free-roaming camera. The most recent Final Fantasy games on PS2 have been fully polygonal, but FFX used mostly static camera angles, just like past games in the series. (FFXI is online and thus strays from quite a few traditions in its own right.) However, it is possible that the current footage of FFCC only shows a battle sequence, and that the game is structured differently most of the time.

The characters shown so far have all been of the “super deformed” art style, and thus it’s quite probable that the game will be heavy on the fantasy elements. A concept drawing of one of the game’s towns also shows off a bright, colorful style that is probably more in line with the franchise’s days on Super NES than some of the recent PSX and PS2 titles. Despite the name, Final Fantasy games have leaned toward more realistic settings from time to time, but it appears that FFCC will not take that route.

Gameplay is still the biggest mystery. Past FF games have included very minor multiplayer features, but Crystal Chronicles looks to venture into the possibilities like never before. Four-player cooperative games are rare enough, but a Final Fantasy title focusing on such a radical game design is truly unprecedented. Whether the game will be playable alone or with less than four people is simply not clear. It’s also not known if a GBA will be required to play. Certainly, the fact that you can control these characters with the GBA’s simple button layout and digital control leads to many conclusions. Without more concrete information about the core gameplay, it’s hard to say what the effects will be.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the gist of this preview is that we simply don’t know much of anything about FFCC yet. What Square has revealed has provided fans with plenty of gossip fodder, but no one really knows what this game is about or how it will play. Perhaps the most important point to make right now is that Final Fantasy is indeed coming to GameCube, and if nothing else, it looks to be quite unusual and controversial.