Echoes of Time Review

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
Square Enix
Action Role-Playing

This dungeon crawler starts out on your character’s birthday and with a coming of age ceremony of types, which seems to be a typical theme for the Crystal Chronicles series thus far. After choosing one of the four races and selecting a gender for you character, it’s time to go out into the world and become an adult. The races are the same four from the previous Crystal Chronicles games and unlike the GameCube version, there is only one character per race and gender, which is a step up from Rings of Fate, where you follow the story by playing as one of two characters who are twins. After a bit of training and some hack-and-slash in the woods, you get a crystal fragment as a symbol of having become an adult. Then tragedy strikes the village and a small girl is struck with “crystal sickness” and you must go out into the world to find the cure, because no one else in the village is able to leave it. Marauding through dungeons, slaughtering creatures, questing for treasure, puzzles and hours of side quests await your character in this action RPG.

The game is pretty straight forward. Your character keeps a journal of his/her adventure, so if you get lost you can always go back to it and try to figure out where to go next. There are only a few dungeons in this game, but many reasons for going back through and gaining more experience. In this game, you collect scrolls and items to create your own armor and weapons. There are a lot of differences in all of the scrolls and when you equip your character with new armor and weapons, his/her clothing and weapon visibly changes. Weapons and armor grow as your character grows, gaining levels and becoming stronger. You can also equip your weapons and armor with gems that give different boosts depending on if you want to max it out to a new level or make it do more damage or give it a higher critical hit ratio. Magic is also a bit easier to use in Echoes of Time than in Rings of Fate. Stacking spells may not be perfect yet, but it’s definitely better than trying to hold two buttons, use a stylus and aim a spell.

Multiplayer has become more assessable with Echoes of Time, but may cause the game to slow down a bit, especially with more players. Multiplayer is assessable with Nintendo WiFi. If you don’t wish to play with friends, you can create your own AI characters and customize them as much as you can customize the main character. If your character loses his/her life, you can just start using one of the other characters you created or you can revive yourself. You can set their sensitivity depending on if you want them to do: “Just Follow Me,” “Do Your Best,” “Don’t Use Magic,” “Protect Yourself,” and “Go Nuts With Magic.” The AI isn’t the best in this game, but there are some puzzles that require more than one character, for whatever purpose. If you just leave the AI at their original setting, “Do Your Best”, they will most likely use up their magic and more than likely end up standing around as ghosts during boss battles. So you will either have to have really high stats or keep reviving them so that they can revive you.

This game is ultimately made for the Nintendo DS, but was released for the Wii as well. Unless you like seeing the DS screens horizontally next to each other on your television set, leaving most of your screen unused, instead of vertical of each other, do not play this game on the Wii. On the Wii, you need to use the buttons to constantly resize the two mini screens, use the nunchuck to run around, the A button to fight, and point the Wii mote at the screen to use the menu, which is how you are able to use any kind of magic. Worse yet, the game was not redesigned for the Wii, so the DS art is blown up and looks fuzzy the bigger the television set. This game was not formatted for the Wii and should never have been produced and released as a Wii game.

The game should take an overall eighteen hours to complete the story. There is not a great deal of dungeons, but the game still has a lot to offer after the story. There are many mini-game type side quests and many of those are multiplayer. There is also a Save+ option once you complete the game. If you liked the story enough to play it again, it would be a good idea to start the game over with the Save+, you get to keep your equipment, armor and weapons and continue to level them up. Hack-and-slash, dungeon crawls have many fans and this one shouldn’t be passed up if you are looking for a little multiplayer or single player action.

I give this game 8 out of 10.