Developed by Dreams Uncorporated and Syck and published by Modus Games, Cris Tales is a brand-new indie title that is a love letter to classic JRPGs. Featuring an amazing soundtrack and a beautiful art style, Cris Tales follows the story of a Time Mage Crisbell who finds out about her powers at a very difficult time and must leave her home to save everyone dear to her. Cris Tales is a turn-based JRPG and combines its unique time management mechanics with turn-based combat to deliver a unique experience. This is our review of Cris Tales in which we manipulate time and explore a beautifully hand-drawn world with a talking frog.
Cris Tales follows the story of a little orphan girl called Crisbell. Crisbell is living with her foster mother Mother Superior and foster sisters. Her life is going well until one day she meets a magical talking frog called Matias and her life changes completely. She finds out that she is a Time Mage and she can see, control, and manage the past, future, and future. Once she discovers a power, she has to leave her life behind and set on a journey with her new companions to defeat the evil Time Empress. She gets to meet new people and explore new areas that she had never seen before.
Cris Tales is played in a beautiful 2.5D world. Most of the time you will be moving right or left like a 2D title but in certain cases, you will also move back and forth on the screen to reach different areas. After acquiring her powers, the main screen is divided into three sections. The middle screen has a triangle that shows the present and this triangle moves around as Crisbell moves around. However, on the left side of the triangle, you can view the past of that location and on the right side of the triangle, you can see the future.
All the three timestamps are visible at the same time and if you want to see a particular moment of a specific location, all you need to do is to move around until that location or person is in the past zone or the future zone to see how they will be or how they were earlier. These powers allow Crisbell to view the future or various things and not all of them are good. Because of this insight, Crisbell can also save particular people around here however even with this power, she has her limitations and can only help a few people. Matias the talking frog can also time-hop between the past and the future to give you more insight into events or help you out in various scenarios.
Very early in the game, you see that two of the houses in your town are in bad condition and if not treated on time, they both will fall. However, once you find the solution, it is just enough to save one house. One of them has a baby while the other one is an Apothecary. At this point, you are given a choice to choose one house that you would want to save for the future. This is your very first choice and a tough one. It shows that being a Time Mage has its limitations as well and as you progress in the story, This also shows that your decisions will impact the world around you and there are plenty of decision points in the main story.
Probably the most obvious thing that you notice right when you start playing Cris Tales is the beautiful visual design of the game. This is where it looks like the developers really worked their charm. The game looks absolutely beautiful and the different areas and landscapes that you explore are brilliantly designed as well. Cris Tales is not really an open-world game, but you can call it an open-area game. Throughout your journey, you will visit various cities, forests, and other areas but moving to these areas happens in the form of a map however once inside an area, you are free to roam around at your will, interact with different NPCs that you meet or purchase or sell items at various vendors.
Some of the areas have hidden chests with different useful items as well that you can open and collect the items inside them for later use. You will notice in the game’s visual design that each area in the game has one dominant color, and that color is more on the screen than other colors. The game is really colorful however one color dominates in each area and that color is unique to each area. This combined with other colors on the screen comprises the overall visual design of Cris Tales. It is not just the levels and the surroundings that are pretty to look at but the character design and their color combinations are really good as well. The characters have big, large bulging eyes with otherwise small faces, yet another nod to JRPGS.
All of this beauty is not just eye-candy because the game features an amazing soundtrack as well. The soundtrack for the game has been created by Tyson Wernli who grew up listening to some of the best soundtracks of his time. According to Tyson Wernli, Cris Tales is his tribute to all of his childhood video games. The soundtrack is different for every area and scenario in the game, and it plays a major role in setting up the mood. It has everything from lyrical melodies to strong rhythms. Throughout the world of Cris Tales, your whole journey is made better as you explore every area and fight every enemy while listening to a great soundtrack.
The combat in Cris Tales is turn-based and for me, you can say that I am currently indecisive about it. For most of the time, the combat is really good and offers a plethora of options to play around with however on the other side, it still feels basic and sometimes fails to register some of my commands. I will explain more of this in detail later in this review. Starting with the most basic of combat mechanics, time plays a vital role in the combat of Cris Tales. Crisbell is a Time Mage, so, naturally, she uses the time to manipulate the combat arena to her benefit.
During combat sequences, the triangle at the center is gone and all you see is the present. However, upon demand, Crisbell can open time fractures on the left and right sides of the screen and affect enemies accordingly. The left side manipulates the past and the right side manipulates the future so if you open a time fracture on the left side of the screen, you can send the enemies back in the past which makes them younger and sometimes smaller as well. On the contrary, if you open the time fracture on the right side of the screen, you can send the enemies into the future thus making them older as well in the process.
This is where the real fun begins. Each of your supporting characters in the game comes with various skills and abilities that compliment Crisbell’s time-shifting power and you can combine them to toy with your enemies. For example, if you apply poison to your enemies, normally, it will hurt them every turn but if you first send them back to the past, apply poison and then bring them to the present, they will be dead because the poison was applied to them in the past. Similarly, you can use water attacks on shielded enemies to cover them in water and then send them to the future to make their shields rusted thus reducing their defense.
I am just giving these two examples in this review but there are tons of other combinations that you can use in the game as you meet with more NPCs and some of them join your party at different points in the main story. You can use time manipulation to your advantage and weaken your enemies in different ways. Apart from time manipulation, you can press the attack buttons at the right time to get a boost as well. If you are attacking the enemy, pressing the attack button at the right time will deal extra damage.
However, if you are defending yourself, pressing the attack key right when the attack connects with you with either parry the attack or block a small part of the attack. This is a useful tactic and in certain battles, this will save you from death plenty of times especially during the early battles of the game. As you continue to unlock more and more skills and abilities, you can rely on them to bring out the pain on your enemies. For your own use, you also find various items such as Health, Mana, and CP potions that also guarantee your survival in the game.
The in-game currency is called Marbles and you use Marbles to purchase and acquire better items and equipment in the game. At the end of every battle, sometimes you get bonus items as well however you ultimately have to save and purchase various supplies such as the dreaded tents for 10,000 gold which is extremely annoying. Tents are a key item of the game and it is just insanely expensive. I am not sure at this point whether they are expensive in order to discourage players from using them or they are just expensive.
With that being said, sadly Cris Tales is not short of its own problems and issues at this point which really set me off as well. This is because Cris Tales starts off really strong and it is not until you are pretty deep into the story that you start noticing various issues with the game. These issues range from technical to in-game balancing. Some of the issues such as the long loading times are evident right from the beginning. For me, the game was loading just fine but it was while saving that I was staring at the screen for a pretty long time. Even with an NVMe SSD, the speeds are not good as they should be. Luckily, the game did not crash even once so it is all good on that end.
My other major concerns with the game include its in-game balancing and combat optimization in the game. The combat sometimes simply refused to accept my inputs, especially during repeat attacks. Some of the bigger enemies land attacks that come in the form of waves and not just a single attack. For these attacks, you have to press the attack again and again in order to block or parry all of them however I noticed that the characters simply refused to parry the next attack after blocking the first one. In a four-attack sequence, the max I managed was blocking two attacks because for the other two in the middle, the game just simply refused to accept my control inputs. This shows that a little bit of combat optimization still needs to be done to make the combat more efficient in all scenarios.
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Final Verdict:
Cris Tales might not be a JRPG, but it certainly has that familiar JRPG-soul. It looks beautiful and the hand-drawn visuals are just gorgeous. The game also starts really strong however as you progress enough in the game, some of the in-game mechanics start to fall short in the game and thus make the game a little more tedious and harder to enjoy. This causes an inconsistency that might throw off some of the more seasoned JPRG fans however if you can ignore these cons, Cris Tales is a beautiful and immersive enough game that will cater to both new and young JRPG lovers. The game desperately needs plenty of balancing both in terms of combat as well as the pricing of various objects in the game. I wanted to give Cris Tales a much higher score as it is pretty evident that the developer has spent a lot of time and a lot of thought and love has gone into the game. However, some of the mechanics are just not good enough and the developer should look towards fixing them in upcoming patches. Still, it is a beautiful JRPG that should be on your must-play list.
Final Score: 7.5/10
