Recent reviews by Dihy

This studio doesn't deserve your dollars, wait for it to come out on discount (at least 50% or more).

This game is garbage.

Controls: 1/5
Music: 5/5
Gameplay: 1/5
Story: 3/5

Final score: 2.5/5

Music is the only good thing about this game. The voice acting must've been done by budget amateurs because it's just awful. The scenery is gorgeous, but underused and underoptimized so it's a resource hog. The controls are just garbage, almost unplayable. Mix of tank controls + camera controls, often times you have problems see the puzzle because of random spins. Movement is awful, sprints are more like light jogs. Text is unskippable so you have to wait for the audio to finish playing.

I spent 26 hours on this game because it was mostly time spent waiting for audio to end. I'm sure with skippable text you could finish this in about 3 hours. The game is actually very, very short. Each chapter has a different length with some containing more content/puzzles than others. The final chapter is extremely short and ends on a cliffhanger.

I do not recommend this game, it's probably going to get retconned in the next game anyways.

The next game already has terrible reviews because of poor optimization. Benoit Sokal really needs to take a second look at these game reviews and figure out if he cares about the characters because this is really pathetic.

Took me a little over 30 hours but I finished it (lots of save file editing).

This game is kind of impossible without a guide, there's a lot of hidden quests you can only obtain by talking to literally everyone in the game.

Leveling is kind of hard because there's not really a spawn site that regenerates regularly. You can eventually unlock some places to train but for your first approach (if you can even get there) you won't be able to win a fight.

Enemies have some insane dodge% skills, you'll miss probably 50% of your attacks, for some boss fights this means a team wipe in the first round.

Status effects are kind of useless.

There are quests that rely on RNG spawns (called RUMORS) on the world map, these RNG spawns never showed up for me so I couldn't complete them.

A number of quests just bugged out, the NPCs that were supposed to accept the quest items just never triggered.

I played the entire game in Traditional Chinese and would say I speed-read 95% of the game. Some sections (like the ending) I slow-played it, but the pace of the game is unbearably slow. Combat is extremely slow, a single round can take a few minutes (some fights can take up to 20 rounds) because of the animation delay and wait times between NPCs executing combat actions.

Overall 2/5, not really "fun to play".

Closing thoughts: This game was also released right before the studio got hit with a huge lawsuit so development/patch fixes were halted for quite some time. Unfortunately not all these bugs got repaired, and they ended up releasing their next game (also in a very broken state at the time). I'll play their next 2 games sometime this year, hopefully they'll be less painful than this one, and thankfully, not the day 1 version.

This game is like a Persona clone with maybe 20% of the variety.

The majority of combat is button mashing combos on palette swapped mobs and grinding experience.

The story is pretty good (very Persona esque), and you can build relationships with characters to improve their assist stats/combos etc.

Music is great 10/10
Combat is boring 5/10
Story is good 8/10
Gameplay is a bit rough around the edges, controls feel unresponsive at times, 6/10.

It's pretty good if you can read Chinese. Some minor bugs.

Difficulty is through the roof, I strongly recommend the guide from Gamer.com.tw.

Lots of missables, of the 109 hours I'd estimate 80 were doing quests. There's only 3 main towns, with hundreds of side quests, and at least 10 different combat/story zones.

True throwback to the JinYong game of the past, and older style Softstar games.

The DLC is kinda buggy, there is a "Wooden Man" quest that is not completable. Music is great 10/10, combat is 10/10 (difficulty is quite challenging), story is 10/10.

Massive stuttering on a RTX 2070lmao.

[updated March 2022]

So I have a 3090 now, and was able to complete the game. I think the game has a lot of scaling issues, monsters 4 levels above you provide little to no exp, your skills are level locked so you can't get more damage to clear your current zone faster. This leads to a lot of very long/boring grind sessions because you do so little damage, everything's a damage sponge, but it's not actually hard.

Game is very old so I doubt anyone's still checking in on this, the studio died as well.

I was hesitant to buy this game, but eventually gave in because of the sale a while back. It has been a mental slog because this is not a very good game.

Crystar is not a very good "game".

If we talk about labyrinth/dungeon crawler games, things that keep them interesting are the unique/non static challenges, such as monsters, or bosses, or puzzles. This game has ~6 kinds of monsters with palette swaps. The bosses are just bullet sponges, you can walk right up to them and button mash, healing when you need to. Even on EASY, it takes forever because your damage doesn't scale well. I hit a 500 chain combo, with an average of 120dmg, meaning this boss had 60000 hp on EASY MODE.

Audio: 9/10, music is great, voice lines are awful (English and Japanese are well done however characters voice their attacks, so in that boss fight above my character spouted 500 combat voice lines...).

Graphics: 6/10, standard for a JRPG engine, the environments and the themes were interesting but could've been developed further, felt like it was half done.

Gameplay: 3/10, this is a very bad "game". The gameplay loop consists of you receiving a mission, running 3 labyrinths, killing the boss, receiving a mission. You're basically watching the minimap and avoiding the enemies because it's a slog, and enemies have a lot of HP. Character combos are irrelevant, just button mash the light attack chain. Combos also lock you into animations so you cannot cancel until they're finished, meaning you just stand there taking hits from enemies.

Plot: 6/10, melancholic theme to the game is unique for the JRPG genre, there are a few other melancholy games that come to mind (I AM SETSUNA) but this one does it pretty well. The plot is full of holes though, and the game makes you jump hurdles to get the "true ending".

Overall: 4/10. This is a very bad "game", if you just watched cutscenes on YouTube, it'd be pretty close to the actual experience of playing the game.


500 combo example:

https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2059641741

This is one of the few games which I have a 100% on achievements for.

Combat - 7/10, while interesting it's not very well implemented. Will bore a lot of people on any difficulty below hard. Once you figure out crafting, bombs can 1 hit KO bosses in hard mode.

Crafting - 10/10, best crafting system I've ever seen or utilized. It was more addicting than the actual game itself. I spent probably 30 hours on gameplay/harvesting, and the remainder 100+ on crafting random things.

Sound - 8/10, not really sure what they're saying in Japanese, but the music was pretty good.

Story/plot - 6/10, standard slice of life fare.

Overall - 8/10, crafting game for the craft addicts. Almost a match-3 like style of addiction where you're creating chains and matching resources to get the final product.

Great music, pretty solid point and click mechanics.

Dialogue seems a bit awkward, but with polish should improve.

10/10 atmosphere.

Don't waste your time.