Crystal Project

Are you craving some old-school JRPG style combat? Crystal Project is for you. It is a well-crafted and loving ripoff of the older Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy 5 specifically. You have a team of generics with the goal of going out into the world for adventure. At home points, you can change classes, and you must find more crystals to unlock more classes. Learn skills, build your team, and go further in search of crystals!

Find it on Steam.

Crystal Project is rather light on story. Rather, it is the combat system and the world that makes things engaging. There is a lot to explore and hidden treasures to find. Getting around the world is actually pretty fun. You start out with just simple jumping around, but you will get other methods of moving that help you reach more places. The world design is full of hidden secrets and places to jump to.

The only thing is that the game only saves your home point location. Every time you load the game, you will be back at the home point, so you can’t just stop in the middle of something since you’ll need to go through everything in between there and your set home point again.

As you explore more and find more maps of places, you’ll realize just how interconnected the world is. While the game guides you in certain directions, it is possible to wander off and find a much higher level area than you can handle at the time. The open-world exploring nature of it is great. And then you realize that there are no loading between areas. The entire world is physically present from buildings to caves. They all have a place they exist in giving it a real sense of space.

Of course, having things being so layered can make the map confusing at times since the map only goes top-down view. Also, you have to mark down locations yourself. There are no auto-map markers. I could do with a few more different types of markers.

The battle system in the game is turn based where a character’s speed determines how often they go. There is a lot of tactics that go into a battle, though. The main thing is that you can see what the enemy is going to do before they do it, so you have an until the enemy’s turn to make a plan. Also, enemies’ have threat and will target certain party members based on who dealt them the most damage or who has the lowest health.

On your side, you can customize your character. Each one has a main job, and then a subclass, then some passives. As you can more classes, you can make more different mixtures of skills and passives. Later on, the enemies do get pretty challenging, and you should start thinking about synergy in party skills.

The battle system isn’t complicated, but it is satisfying and challenging.

The monsters on the world map are pretty interesting as well. They’re all represented as flames, but they do have different behaviors. Most of them will try to attack you, but they move differently. By the way the move, you can tell what kind of monster it is. For example, a flame that charges you in a straight line turns out to be a rhino enemy.

Now based on the previous screenshots of the game, you may be thinking that this game looks kind of generic. For those that have browsed popular 2D graphics resources, this game is mainly built out of generic commercially available resources. It is the same with the music. They come from music packs. Still, putting it all together, the graphics and style of the game work well. It is charming with some memorable tunes.

The way the world is built draws you into want to explore just a bit more and see where you can reach. There are a lot of different zones and interesting exploration and platforming. Once you unlock more travel methods, the scale of the world increases. All for the sake of gathering more crystals and unlocking the next class.

Crystal Project is a game made by one person and is an homage to the JRPG’s of old. It is low muss, low fuss, go out there and explore kind of game. All you know is you must find more crystals. And there’s mod support! With some neat mods out, too.

Find it on Steam.