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 Crystal Project is the bizarre lovechild of a JRPG and a 3D Platformer, toting an open world that you can explore at your leisure with a job system similar to that of Final Fantasy V's, where you have your current job and can also use the abilities of another job. There's a huge emphasis on exploration, whether for crystals (which grant you jobs), treasure, or something even more awesome. It's surprising how well it all works together.  There's a pretty extensive demo on the Steam page if this sounds at all interesting to you! You start off in a tutorial area where you learn the ropes, then you get a bit of an area to explore with the mission of finding three crystals before you get to the real meat of the game. There's a plot, though it takes awhile to kick in and from what I've played so far it doesn't have a huge presence, but it's there.  At first, all you have for exploration is your trusty jump, but as you progress in the game you'll find items that expand your exploration abilities. There's a limited fast travel system, where you can always pick one save point as your "Home Point" that you can fast travel to whenever, and as you play you may find shrines where you can buy items (including a permanent item) that lets you fast travel to said shrine. But if that sounds limiting, there's Assist Options to give you more flexibility in fast travel, among other things. Also, you have to find or buy maps to be able to track where you are and see what you've explored.  This game really shines in its combat. First off, no random encounters, all encounters, including bosses, show up as flames in the overworld, and if you're skilled or observant enough you can dodge them completely. If you do go into combat, you go into your standard JRPG battle system, though the nice thing about this is that you have almost perfect information. You can see turn order, see what attacks the enemies will use, who they're going to target, how much damage they'll do, how much damage you'll do to the enemy, the chance to hit and crit, all of that is information the game actively gives you. On top of that, debuffs always hit, so no worrying about whether a foe is immune to a status effect or if you're just whiffing on a 55% chance or whatever. And of course, there's the jobs. You start off with six (think the six jobs available in FF1 and that's pretty much it), but will gain a lot more as you explore and find more crystals. As you'd expect, there's a variety of both your usual staples (dual-wielding Ninja, the Scholar that learns and uses enemy magic, the Chemist which is the only way to use items in battle) as well as some more interesting and unique jobs. Each job has a variety of abilities to learn, with skills using AP (which you gain during battle from attacking and being attacked), MP (your standard magic pool of points), or having a cooldown (you have to wait X turns to use that skill again). There's also passives you can equip, letting you use additional weapons in battle, boosting AP generation, giving buffs at the start of combat, and so on. There's a good bit of flexibility as you'd expect, and the foes are tuned so that random encounters will require thought and use of resources, while bosses may take some cunning to take down, especially later in the game. While it's a complete product, the developer is still working on it, doing fixes and balancing and such, even planning features like randomization and such. I haven't finished this yet, but this is already probably my favorite game of the year, and it does a lot of stuff that I always dreamed my ideal JRPG would do were I to ever make one. I'm constantly impressed with the scope and ambition of this game, and that's mostly why I made this thread, to increase exposure to this gem of a game. As mentioned, there's a demo available, so if you're at all interested check it out!
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Jun 17, 2022 20:26
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:22 |
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Jun 17, 2022 20:26
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One thing that's impressing me as I play on is the dungeon variety. Yeah, it starts with some generic settings like caves and such, but later on you get stuff like a Zelda love letter complete with static screens ala Zelda 1 and vertical dungeon puzzles like later Zeldas, as well as a weird 2D platforming stage involving slopes. And the music is pretty banger for these areas as well, which always helps.
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Jun 18, 2022 21:12
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It's be cool if instead of doing it by gender, have the option to do slight stat bonuses per character like FF5 does, but make it random.
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Jun 21, 2022 14:05
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I think there's some lore books a NPC has early in the game, maybe in the Capital but I don't remember where exactly, that briefly go into that stuff, and you may want to check the message board at the center of the Capital, but otherwise yeah, it does kinda come out of nowhere.
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Jun 22, 2022 01:15
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Finally beat the ultimate boss and got all the achievements. The very final boss was tough until I got the Warlock ultimate armor, which lets you use unlimited Dualcast, and after several Summons got them to critical and my Valhalla/Hunter getting Banished, my Warlock used his 400+MP to slowly chip away the rest of them in one turn to the point where Burn damage would finish them off. What a game! Probably my GotY so far, I'd love to do some challenges at some point, among other things. Definitely gonna take a break for now though!
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Jun 27, 2022 22:20
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Do the pro strat and run back into the building and have it chase you into the spikes, so that it's gone when you respawn and you can skip the entire battle.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:23
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https://twitter.com/RiverRunGames/status/1558457549279698945 Randomizer seems to be going well! ...Mostly.
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Aug 13, 2022 21:31
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https://twitter.com/RiverRunGames/status/1563948768638242822 Version 1.30 is up on the beta branch. It includes New Game +, Challenge Modes, and a Randomizer.
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Aug 28, 2022 21:40
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https://twitter.com/RiverRunGames/status/1583768622475845632
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Oct 22, 2022 13:18
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There's now Steam Workshop support for Crystal Project.
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Jun 4, 2023 12:37
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https://twitter.com/RiverRunGames/status/1701020714374230320
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Sep 11, 2023 19:45
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IIRC you can also use Assist Mode or whatever to skip all that bullshit if it's too tedious. You can climb the tree without a gold quintar, it's a total pain in the rear end but I've managed to do it. Then I got stuck on that boss and ended up wasting that whole trip there. Fun times... Of course you'll want a gold quintar anyway because the best armor in the game requires using one to access.
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Sep 12, 2023 12:18
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:22 |
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Warlock Mail is the only reason I was able to beat the final boss battle. That thing is pure cheese and I love it.
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Mar 28, 2024 20:54
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