Legends of Crystal

"It's a pity, but as a player, sometimes you just gotta cut your losses." This was the opening line of my original review - and I should have heeded my own advice. After many more (wasted) hours, my verdict remains the same: The good gameplay can't make up for the atrocious story/script, the many bugs and the frequent crashes. The game seems to offer a lot of content, adequate dungeon design/mapping and a lot of interesting skills to use during combat. Sadly, the game suffers from frequent random crashes on non-high-end PCs (even on the lowest option settings, e.g. without animated tiles), especially before/after combat and during map transitions (and as an added "bonus", each crash completely resets the option settings). Without auto-save or save anywhere features being available, these crashes make the game unplayable for me. Although the developer pushed an update, seemingly addressing this issue, it didn't help at all on my side. As a consequence, I closed and restarted the game every half-hour by myself (which, of course, still reset the options every time), and during my grinding sessions near save crystals, I saved the game after every battle. I thought having to do this would be a thing of the past after the early era of RPG Maker VX (Ace) games in which battles frequently crashed the game, and I'm sure the developer hasn't yet exhausted all of RPG Maker MZ's options to alleviate the issue. In all honesty, though, the crashes were just the final nail in the coffin. The worst offender is the script, which includes the main story in general as well as all dialogues. Not only are the dialogues cringe-worthily bad, the script is littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Commas are mostly absent, which leads to a lot of "Let's eat grandpa" moments, and for whatever reason the developer couldn't be bothered to finish sentences by setting a period at the end. I've played my fair share of amateurish commercial (RPG Maker) JRPGs, but I can't remember having ever encountered a worse script (during a game's beginning sections). I'm not a native English speaker, which makes me somewhat more tolerant and understanding, but this game's script is simply unacceptable for a commercially released game. The developer apparently isn't a native English speaker, too, so it would be foolish to expect great improvements in this department. Furthermore, it doesn't help that the story - something about the power of the elemental crystals - has been told a million times in the past, and the one-dimensional, not logically acting characters aren't able to elevate this simple setting. Many bugs and inconsistencies convey the impression that this game isn't in a very polished state yet. The quest log seems to be mostly useless, and during my now abandoned playthrough, it stopped working completely early on during chapter 3. While this issue wouldn't be such a great deal per se, the story often times doesn't make it very clear where the player is supposed to go. On the other hand, it isn't really rocket science to advance the story, so at least experienced players will be able to manage. The battle system is, without a doubt, this game's highlight. Skills are varied and can be leveled up through usage, and summoning beasts to unleash even more devastating skills is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the game features (limited) level-scaling (for random encounters), which makes random encounters a chore in many locations. In terms of cost-benefit ratio, one early game location was far superior for a long time, but powerleveling there certainly didn't do me much good, since it made random encounters later on even more difficult and unrewarding. Boss encounters don't seem to be affected by the level-scaling, but they take all your overpowered skills into consideration, which means bosses take forever to beat nonetheless. Another drawback resulting from my powerleveling was the availability of equipment, which seems to be related to the protagonist's level rather than story advancement. If you want to fill out the game's encyclopedia, you need to buy/obtain everything anyway, but grinding in my favorite early-game location didn't yield enough money, so I couldn't afford the best equipment when it became available, even though I would have needed it because of the level-scaling. So yeah, this game design certainly doesn't work for a stubborn player like me. Anyway, there's a lot to do for completionists (in theory), which is usually a good thing. Beware, though, that (certain?) treasure chests seem to contain randomized loot - a mechanic that I hate as much as most other mechanics with "randomized" in their names. Enemies only seem to drop "treasure chests" (instead of equipment), by the way, which - you probably already guessed it - can be opened to obtain randomized loot. While I'm not averse to gacha mechanics despite their random nature, it seems a bit lazy to rely solely on them. If your PC is potent enough (so that you don't have to worry about performance-related crashes) and if you can bear with the horrendous story/script and the multitude of bugs/inconsistencies, give the game a try, because battles and dungeons/areas seem to be competently designed. Since I don't want to continue my playthrough (mostly because of the crashes) and can't ignore the abysmal script, though, I still can't in good conscience recommend this game.

RPG Maker strikes again! "Legends of Crystal" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Yes, this is made with one of the newer versions of RPG Maker, and what this tells us is that the newer versions of RPG Maker are also garbage. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This is an Indonesian game from what I can tell, and it's clear the English is either Google Translated or just slapped together by someone with a loose grasp of the language. It's glutted with spelling and grammatical errors, and the writing itself is pure garbage. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? "Legends of Crystal" has the total ripoff price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]

As an RPG player, I really dig this game for its storyline and the totally unexpected easter eggs. These items are super helpful for grinding to reach the level I want. For RPG players who love hidden mysteries from developers, this might be the perfect game for you. My advice is to save your game often because it tends to force close after about 40 minutes. Hope the developers can fix this soon!

Constant crashing and the broken menus and controller settings makes game impossible to finish.

Random Scuffed Games # 148 https://twitch.tv/DitoMido Aktuelle Spielequeue: https://rsg.ditomido.de Vorgeschlagen von: Delphinio Legends of Crystal ist ziemlich direkt, gleich zu beginn wird erklärt was es mit den Kristallen auf sich hat und das Spiel bedient sich hier an sehr typischen Klischees zwischen gut und böse sowie altbewähren JRPG Turn Based Kampfsystemen. Wenn man diese mag könnte das Spiel vielleicht was für einen sein, bisher wirkt aber alles noch ziemlich generisch und gimmecky für mich. Natürlich sollte hier die erstmal für eine Einführung im Fordergrund stehen, allerdings waren in den ersten 3 Kämpfen alle davon inszeniert und keine echten. Somit kann ich leider noch keinen wirklichen Grund zur Empfehlung abgeben, außer dass es wohl für den Preis mindestens solide zu sein scheint. Rating: Dito: 3.3/5 Chat: 3.35/5 Gesamt: 3.33/5