Crystal Project was a game recommended to me as an RPG with Metroidvania elements, similar to Wine & Roses and Teenage Costume Squad. I’ve long thought a commercial-length version of those games would be the best thing ever, so I jumped at the chance to try this.

Unfortunately, the game is just a standard open-world RPG and not the kind of tactical-Metroidvania experience I was hoping for. It has Metroidvania elements, but they’re entirely based on traditional Metroidvania principles of overcoming physical barriers, not tactical ones. I wasn’t blindsided because the game’s description was pretty clear about this, but it was still disappointing. It managed to be good for what it was, but falls into many of the usual problems with both jRPGs and open-world games.

So. The first thing you will notice is that the game looks like Minecraft, which is to say, butt-ugly. I’m told that this art style is called “voxel” (short for “volumetric pixel”). I presume the hideous block style of RPG Maker VX was either a precursor or attempted emulation of this. It’s slightly better than RMVX on account of being actually 3D, but it’s still hideous and I remain baffled why anyone would willingly make a game in this graphical style. (All those sharp edges, eugh.)

The second thing you will notice is that this game is also a platformer. There is a dedicated jump button and you are forced to use it constantly. Every area is absurdly vertical and demands platforming in order for you to get anywhere; and yes, you’d be correct in assuming this means every area is a minefield of one-way drops. If you fail a platforming challenge, you better hope you set a teleport point near where you started because otherwise you will be spending 5 minutes trekking back there. (The game even has a character joke about this, because it thinks joking about its terrible design decisions makes up for its decision to make the game miserable to play.) This makes exploration — you know, the key feature of any Metroidvania or open world — an absolute chore constantly interrupted by resets instead of any kind of smooth, organic experience. Even the Mario RPGs don’t have this much platforming; we did not need this.

Oh, and you can’t freely warp between save points, so you’ll have to do tons of backtracking regardless. There’s an easy mode that magnanimously extends the number of warp points you can store from one to three, which barely helps. The only justification I could possibly see for this is to prevent you from warping to an inn and then back in the middle of a dungeon, except the shrine stones let you do that anyway so there is really no point to this other than wasting the player’s time.

If you can get past all of this you can finally start playing the actual game, which is a class-changing jRPG a la Final Fantasy V. Each class has a unique set of abilities, and you can additionally assign the skillset of one other class. Winning battles as a class gets you class experience as well as regular experience, and you can spend class experience to learn new skills. In principle this is all well and good; in practice it’s a grindfest because there are way, way too many classes, to the point that your starting classes outnumber your total party members. (And the total number of classes? Twenty-four.) I really wish they had given you a fifth party member to give you just a bit more wiggle room on this. It doesn’t help that the class roles are very lopsided — there are a bajillion offensive casters, several tanks and fighters, and like… two support casters.

The game is also a grindfest in the normal way, too, because as with all jRPGs each area has only 3 or 4 encounters you are forced to fight dozens of times. To make matters worse, enemies have extremely rigid AI that almost always uses the exact same actions every time, so there are never any curveballs; if you beat an encounter once, the same series of actions will win that encounter again (barring random confounders like misses and crits). Battles quickly become tedious and frustrating due to all the repetition, which is a shame because a lot of enemies have genuinely clever behavior patterns that reward thoughtful counterplay; but, well, you only need to solve a puzzle once. And again as with all jRPGs, 90% of battle is determined on the equip screen, so even if you do know the correct solution to a fight you may not be able to execute it because you forgot to bring the right classes or equipment into the fight, so back to the last save point with you, sucker!

And now we get into the open world aspect, which has the exact same problem as Pokemon Scarlet & Violet: There is no level scaling, so there is still a linear, intended route you’re supposed to play in, just no indication of what that route is. To its credit the game is much better about nudging you towards the right path than S&V (and you can see before a battle how strong the enemies are in relation to you), but there were still multiple times when I slogged through a brutal dungeon only to find myself steamrolling everything in the next one because, oops, turns out I was supposed to do those in the opposite order. I think in principle it’s good to give players the freedom to challenge themselves by doing things out of order, but it really shouldn’t be possible to do that accidentally.

Of course, even when you do travel along the intended path you will be flattened into paste by the encounters because the game is also absurdly punishing. It’s more reasonable in the early game, but once you’re past the introductory section enemies will regularly two-shot your characters right at the start of battle, and by the endgame they will frequently oneshot them by doing more damage than they have max HP. This is made worse by an aggro system that ensures they will focus-fire on whoever did the most damage (i.e. your caster); the tank classes are supposed to control this, but enemies also love to spam defense-piercing attacks, so this usually amounts to your tank surviving a single hit at critical health instead of being instantly reduced to giblets, and that’s it. Your healer has to be constantly spamming the heal-all spell when they’re not desperately reviving people, which is just a deeply unfun way to play. I do not want one of my four characters locked into doing a single action the entire fight, thanks. Most of your strategy involves disabling enemies so that they can’t attack you at all, because it’s that or instant death with no middle ground. (The game does, quite reasonably, recognize that hold statuses are overpowered and restricts them to one use per battle… which really just turns every battle into a question of “Can I beat everything in the single free turn I got from my hold effect?”)

Another common RPG element the game uses that I hate: Refusing to decouple quantitative and qualitative equipment bonuses. You like inflicting poison with your weapon attacks? Too bad, that weapon falls below the curve once you enter the midgame. There are so many interesting equipment effects and I especially liked how weapon skills retained the add-on effects of your weapons, but they’re all rendered obsolete by the power curve far too quickly.

It’s a shame, because I do feel there are good elements here. The diversity of the classes is impressive, and I particularly liked how they managed to make rogues feel mechanically distinct from fighters. Enemies will throw some pretty weird stuff at you and it’s fun to think about how you’re supposed to use your tools to counter them. Oh, and items are restricted to one class (FF Tactics style), so in-battle MP management actually matters! (Not sure why it wasn’t one of the starting classes like in FFT, but points for trying.) I just wish those clever ideas didn’t have to be chained to such tedious, repetitive, punishing gameplay. jRPGs need to break out of the genre conventions that have held them hostage for so long and realize that challenges need to be placed tactically, like in every other genre, not copy-pasted willy-nilly as if that’s a substitute for real gameplay.

Oh, and the quintar breeding minigame can go to Hell. That was not a mechanic that needed to be imported from establishment jRPGs. It might have been okay if it was unlocked in the early game so you had time to work on it over the whole game, but no, the incredibly finnicky and time-consuming minigame just had to be restricted to the very end of the game where your only option is to do it all in one sprint. WHY WAS IT DONE THIS WAY.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to play Teenage Costume Squad again.