Cris Tales is a Colombian JRPG, which I suppose makes it a CRPG, except that’s already a thing. Gaming has too many acronyms. It’s a game that’s simultaneously set in the past, present, and future, and that’s incredibly fitting - its forward thinking narrative and characterisation is constantly held back by some extremely dated gameplay design.
Cris Tales does a lot of things right. While the triple-A scene becomes increasingly homogeneous in its gritty, realistic aesthetic, it’s the indie titles that are providing us with more interesting palettes. Cris Tales is one such indie. Each location is bursting with oranges and yellows and golden browns - all the beauty and vibrancy of The Princess and the Frog’s daytime scenes have been dialled up even brighter here. Crisbell, our protagonist, illuminates each place with a whimsical and colourful cartoonish design, while the dark and spiky enemies offer a distinct contrast.
Every new area you visit feels handpainted and cherished. Your hometown, a farming village, is crisp and simple, with plain white buildings and lines of flaxen corn swaying in the wind. As you journey through the forests, the game trades this down to earth colouration for an explosion of greens. In the first major city, there’s a huge gap between the soft beige and thick browns of the poor slums, and the much cleaner pearls and gold of the rich district. This district also takes us out to the coast, where we see the clear blue of the game’s pure shores.
I could talk about the game’s art style all day, but (un)fortunately there’s more to the game than that. Its central mechanic, letting you play in the past, present, and future, largely works, although the more thematic it becomes as a narrative device, the more of a gimmick it becomes in battle. Outside of combat, it’s a brilliant idea, and one executed fairly well. In combat - already the game’s weakest area - it just drags the experience down even further.
Let’s start with what works. Gameplay wise, the time travel mechanic is used cleverly in a variety of ways. For example, if you plant a seed in the past, you’ll be able to climb a tree in the present. You’ll also be faced with choices in the present that distinctly influence the future, and collectibles or clues to certain side quests will be locked in the past. You are asked to repair two houses, but only have materials for one. In the future, the house you don’t repair will cave in.
The time travel is particularly impressive when you consider it thematically. When we visit this city with its elegant pearl mansions and wooden brown shanty towns, it seems like a typical gulf of rich and poor. We’ve seen it all before. When we return later, the future vision of the shanty town is underwater, while the wealthiest citizens remain high and dry. Nothing has changed in the real world, but the stakes are raised. Change the direction of the future, or all the people here, everyone struggling day to day to get by, will either be dead or displaced.
Unfortunately, combat is rarely this layered. More often than not, the enemy will be weaker in either the past or the future, so Crisbell’s first move will be to send them there. No tactics are needed for this - if they’re on the left, they go to the past, and the right to the future. Occasionally, you’ll need to combine attacks - for example, if you use a water attack then send them to the future, they’ll rust.
That’s the most frustrating thing about the combat - on the surface, it sounds very clever. Combining time travel and status effects to multiply their damage? This is not a system that has been phoned in. But it fights against itself far too much. As a turn-based RPG where certain bosses can completely disable certain party members for a turn, it can take forever to set these combos up - especially when Crisbell spends the early parts of the game doubled up as the party’s healer, and must choose between healing or time magic. It also doesn’t help that enemies aren’t visible in the overworld at all, meaning avoiding combat if you’re on low health - or full health and about to retry a tough battle - is impossible. Fleeing is an option, but it’s unreliable.
Aside from Crisbell, players can either heal with potions or by sleeping in tents, both of which cost money - tents cost an extortionate amount in the first half of the game - and are somewhat hard to come by out in the wild.
The first major boss is the best example of this. It attacks with two claws: one on the left, one on the right. Each can be sent to the past or the future, but spending a turn to analyse each claw reveals that only sending the left one to the past actually weakens it. So you attack this claw and get it down to empty health, and it spends two turns healing itself with a little orb. You need to attack this orb to kill the boss, but that means repeatedly defeating a claw for the chance to fight the orb.
Meanwhile, the boss can disable one of your three-man party for a whole round, and Crisbell will likely spend at least a third of the encounter throwing her turn away to heal. Another party member specialises in poison attacks, which the boss is immune to. Oh, and these claws use charged attacks, which require you to either waste a turn defending - something the disabled party member cannot do - or take the hit and have Crisbell heal them. I eventually felled the boss, but not before losing and realising that, despite completing every side quest available so far, exploring the map for chests, and rarely fleeing from battle, I’d need to level grind to stand a chance of going the distance.
Playing Cris Tales is like reading an especially lyrical Paulo Coelho novel, except every ten pages or so, someone slaps it out of your hands. Then you realise some pages are out of order, and you need to flick through the seemingly random pattern before you continue. Also, some pages are so smudged and coffee stained you can’t read them, and a few pages haven’t been translated at all. When Cris Tales works, it’s a wonderful experience, and there’s a great game in here somewhere, but it sabotages itself at every turn. I’ll be keeping a close eye on Dreams Uncorporated - but Cris Tales is a near miss that looks to the future, while clinging too hard to the past.
Score: 3/5. A review code was provided by the publisher.