Subtitles section Play video
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How many Game Boy Advance units do you own? If the answer isn’t “four,” you’re
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probably not going to appreciate this game to its fullest. Granted, only once in my life
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did I have the opportunity to play Crystal Chronicles with a truly full party, but the
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experience still ranks on my “If I have the time and money and three complacent friends”
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list. There’s no substitute for it. The teamwork necessary, the coordinated movement
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to stay within the aura of the chalice, the trading and dealing to make sure all your
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members are well-equipped and battle-ready... It’s like D&D, only Final Fantasy flavored,
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and running on your GameCube.
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In a world filled with poisonous Miasma (and similarities to Final Fantasy IX, but those
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are left as an exercise for the reader), caravans full of adventurers criss-cross the land,
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searching for the magical substance known as myrrh to keep their villages safe. Your
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party of up to four represent one of these caravans, travelling through dungeons to find...
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trees. Trees guarded by giant enemy crabs and Malboros and whatnot. Defeat these bosses
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and you gain a drop of Myrrh for your chalice (popularly known as the Bucket by depraved
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individuals with no sense of modesty), obtain three drops and your village is safe for another
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year. While you can play the game solo with a moogle maintaining your bucket, the real
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selling point of the game is the multiplayer, which requires each party member to have their
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own Game Boy Advance, connected to the GameCube via a link cable. The controls are simple:
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the L and R buttons cycle through your customizable command list, A performs the selected command,
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B interacts with objects and picks up the spoils of war, and select allows for direct
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interaction with the GBA, to set commands, check inventory, and view various other information.
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It’s a multiplayer RPG, it’s just not massive or online. It demands that the players
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be in the same room, and to that end demands communication in real-time as one player might
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have the area map, but another has the positions of the enemies. Coordinated spellcasting,
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likewise, results in drastically increased effects, and you’ll have to get along to
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transfer and trade weapon and armor recipes and the materials required to craft them.
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Through the years, your character continues to develop, through stat bonuses from items
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rather than by a level system, and can even be loaded onto a memory card and transferred
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to another system to take part in further adventures. You can even play multiplayer
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mode alone - as I’ve had to this entire time - if you want to do some solo adventuring
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or item hunting. It’s a massive paradigm shift, bolstered by a great soundtrack and
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maybe the best visual display on the ‘Cube, and one that later games bearing the Crystal
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Chronicles name simply have not been able to live up to. I don’t want to buy two more
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GBAs and Link Cables, but every time I brush up against this title, that temptation rears
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its ugly head.
