Cris Tales
Available on: Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Google Stadia
Developer: Dreams Uncorporated, SYCK | Publisher: Modus Games
“Cris Tales” reminds me of a lot of Japanese role-playing games I’ve played over the years. It’s undeniably an homage to the classic formula forged by series like Final Fantasy and Tales, though not always for the better. One element of old-school JRPGs that should stay in the past is the monotony — the endless grinding to level up, unskippable dialogue, and other frustrating hallmarks — and, unfortunately, “Cris Tales” replicates this so well that even its gorgeous art style and effortless charm quickly wear thin.
You play as Crisbell, your typical bubbly, bright-eyed heroine, as she comes into her newfound powers as a time mage. The story itself is also what you’d expect: Crisbell joins up with a misfit crew of companions and gallivants around the world to take down the villain whose evil plan threatens to destroy everything. What sets “Cris Tales” apart is its whimsical fantasy setting and character design, which both proudly lean into the type of over-the-top anime tropes that no doubt helped inspire the game in the first place.
The world of “Cris Tales" is something plucked out of the pages of a children’s storybook: It uses marbles as currency; its colorful cities are populated by goblins, bird folk and other fantastical characters; and your main form of transportation is a giant floating statue of a women. Oh, and throughout your journey, you’re accompanied by a frog wearing a bow tie and a top hat.
The game’s hand-drawn, 2D style particularly shines in combat, where the unique animations for each character’s abilities make battles feel like a production. You fight against a backdrop that reflects the area you’re in — such as salt mines, ancient ruins, or a river flowing from a rainbow-colored waterfall. Personality is stuffed into every corner of “Cris Tales.” Whenever my party attacks, my little talking frog companion throws on a pair of boxing gloves and pretends to fight too. Another character whips out a roulette wheel, her outfit changed to look like a stage assistant and a microphone appearing from thin air, before executing a random magic attack.
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Where “Cris Tales” is most innovative is with its time-manipulation mechanics, which play with typical RPG conventions in refreshing ways. When walking around towns, the screen is usually split into three sections to show the past, present and future of Crisbell’s immediate surroundings simultaneously.
Seeing three time periods at once can be a bit disorienting in practice, but for the most part it worked beautifully as a vehicle for visual storytelling. In one of the first cities you visit, I wandered around endlessly, mesmerized and eager to find out how the bustling city could become the desolate, flooded ruins I saw in its future. The game gets a lot of mileage out of these time-traveling hijinks, having you hop into the past (quite literally, because, you know, the whole frog thing) or jump to the future to complete quests. Fetch quests and run quests in RPGs can feel like a slog, but getting to see how my choices influenced the future of those around me was a wholly unique and exciting experience; it made me feel like I really had an impact on this little make-believe world.
These choices can be as trivial as helping someone pick what color to paint their house or deciding the best emergency response as a wave of lava threatens the city. In one instance, I ran across a street performer playing the violin. With my future vision, I can see he’s abandoned his violin and become a bandit. But, after giving him a hefty chunk of change to invest in his music training, he appears as an accomplished violinist in the future. When I help another character, he vows to solve the city’s flooding problem, and suddenly the city is no longer underwater in the future, opening up new areas to explore. At one point, I had to choose which city leader to back and I was genuinely heartbroken to see that, under the new management I’d picked, the city’s fate remained just as bleak as before.
In battle, this time-traveling mechanic plays on JRPG conventions in some interesting ways, though not nearly as well. Combat is mostly turn-based, with certain actions such as parrying, blocking and doing critical damage tied to real-time inputs. Unlike your companions, who stick to physical and magical attacks, Crisbell can send enemies into the past or the future to cause damage, enhance the effects of status ailments, or make enemies weaker or stronger. For example, when I poison an enemy, rather than waiting for the spell to slowly sap its health, I can send it to the future, where the combined damage kills it instantly. In another instance, I thwart a boss with powerful healing magic by sending her back a turn every time she casts a spell to recover. The game establishes several of these applications early on, but unfortunately recycles them throughout the game rather than building on them in any meaningful way. By the end of it, I hardly used Crisbell’s time manipulation powers at all. They just weren’t worth losing a turn that could be put to better use healing the party or buffing a stronger character’s stats to do several times whatever damage sending enemies whirling through time could.
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While these time-traveling antics offer a refreshing twist on the JRPG formula, they can’t distract from the many ways “Cris Tales” takes its self-described title as a “love letter to classic JRPGs” too literally. As much as I love the games I grew up with, I’m quietly thankful for the quality of life updates like auto-saving and accessibility options that have become standard practice in the decades since. “Cris Tales” forgoes many of these.
You can’t skip or tweak the speed of dialogue, so you hear the same snippets on loop as you upgrade your equipment or complete other routine tasks. The game’s dependence on dedicated save points was similarly frustrating, as was its lack of a fast-travel system. But I might have been able to overlook all of those if I had the option to change Crisbell’s walking speed. “Cris Tales” bills itself as a 20-30 hour game, but I think it would have been half that length if you weren’t forced to stick to her leisurely pace. Your froggy companion, who you need by your side to hop to the past or present, is somehow even slower, often taking 10 to 15 seconds to catch up while you wait and twiddle your thumbs.
And while the game’s more populated areas were fun to explore, not even its gorgeous art style can hide the bareness of its dungeons. The settings themselves are fantastical, but its 2D art is unmistakably laid over basic 3D shapes and placed in a way that seems designed to needlessly slow the player down rather than add anything to the experience. This becomes impossible to ignore as you spend hours running around bland dungeons to level up, because what’s an authentic homage to JRPGs without grinding? Enemies are recycled throughout the game’s five regions with only minor tweaks to their design, and the main campaign forces you to revisit every boss and region several times over, all of which adds to the tedium.
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While in dungeons, Crisbell can use her time magic to decay or restore certain objects to solve puzzles, reveal new paths or uncover treasure, though these abilities aren’t unlocked until later in the game and feel more like an afterthought. Some of its most interesting applications, like the ability to move objects before manipulating them, don’t show up until the game’s final hours.
While “Cris Tales” is occasionally difficult, that difficulty never feels intentional. This was especially onerous in boss battles where new mechanics were thrown in with zero explanation. The game’s confusing user interface made trying to determine the battle’s turn order — an essential element of landing some time-travel maneuvers — a headache. In more than one boss battle, I won, but had no idea how I did it.
Side quests can be a challenge to unlock in the first place, which can be especially frustrating because whether you choose to complete these missions influences what options you have over the fate of an area. An indicator pops up above a non-playable character to signal an available side quest, but these are unlocked seemingly randomly as you complete the main campaign, forcing you to periodically double back and check on townspeople in three timelines for a completionist run.
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Personally, with any game, I’m going to exhaustively explore my surroundings, but the game’s quests have you retracing your steps so often that even my eyes started to glaze over after a while. This also led to instances where I’d find clearly important items, only for the characters to remark, “There’s nothing of interest here” because I had to figure out how to trigger the quest it was meant for first.
“Cris Tales” is a game that sticks too closely to the shadow of its inspiration, and that’s a shame since what innovation it does offer by adding time traveling to the mix holds a lot of potential. The game realizes this potential in an engaging and poignant way through the player’s interaction with other characters and choices that influence the fate of the game’s regions. However, the novelty of these time-traveling shenanigans quickly wears off as you spend dozens of hours trudging through tedious gameplay and repetitive battles.
While brimming with gorgeous visuals and charm, for a game about time, “Cris Tales” doesn’t seem to value yours.
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