The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, I’ve been playing a decent amount of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time with my brother!
It’s guud.

That’s it.

No, wait, I guess not.

If you never played a Crystal Chronicles game, basically this is Square attempting to make a Diablo some other multiplayer-oriented dungeon crawl lewt fest. It works pretty well, for the most part! Especially with this latest rendition, I feel like they’ve worked all the kinks out. Well, most.
What kinks, you ask? Well, in the first game on Gamecube, not only did you have to have 4 GBAs and link cables for the party times, there was also the element of the bucket, which you had to have one player basically regulating to carrying around. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, as normally you just make that person dedicated healer, too, and it’s not TOO bad? But it was still kind of completely bullshit.
Then came Ring of Fates on DS. It was alright, but with no online play and some weird interface things it wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been. The whole stocking up casts of spells was also kinda… not really what I wanted out of a game like that. Also also, since only me and Spants had a copy, there was not much playing going on, unfortunately.

Now, with Echoes of Time, there are both Wii and DS versions, and they can talk to each other! For some reason, having one player be on the big TV just kinda… makes it more likely that we’ll play multiplayer. Add that to the fact that my brother has a copy, so we can just 2-player it often, and you have a recipe for success. At least for me.
In previous Crystal Chronicles games, you had to pick up your magic as you play. In the first, you’d find a “cure” orb in a chest, and then you could cast cure all you’d like, with no limit. In the second, you’d find 3 Cure orbs, and you could then cast cure 3 times. In this game, you start out with every spell already, and it goes back to the tried and true MP system. While this does lose some of the uniqueness from the game, it also makes combat flow a whole lot better, I think. Especially better than in Ring of Fates, where I, at least, felt really limited with what I could do with magic because I felt it was so limited. The whole “stacking” system of mixing magic to create more powerful spells or different spells is still in place, though. I’m making my standard “physical attacker but I can cure” hero, so I’m not messing with that much besides the occasional Cura, but Jonathan is making good use of that with his Yuke.

Yeah, Jonathan and I, as usual, make a pretty good team in these kinds of games. Jonathan is really aiming for an all magic-attack build, and it seems to be working pretty well for him (except when he accidentally hits me with Bio). My Clavat (currently dressed in a White Mage Hood with what seems to be a chainmail dress, or maybe a chainmail shirt that is, say, made for an adult while my character is but a wee child) brings the mad physical beats, especially now that I gave in and am using a sword, which Clavats are just racially better with. I hope we can play through the whole game before we get bored.

Although you don’t find lewt in the field, you do find millions of craftables and sometimes recipes, which you can use to make a pretty decent variety of gear. Everything looks different, too, so you can really make your character look like something. There’s pieces that make you look like classic Final Fantasy classes, as well as other things, of course. Being able to show off such lewt is always a plus in games like this.

The game has online play, but the one time I tried it, just for a minute, it was laggy as fuck. People say they can get into some good games, but the one time I tried, there was literally a second lag between me hitting a button and something happening. Not cool in an action game! So while I appreciate it being in the game, I may not get much use out of it. I mostly got it for local play.

This is my biggest gripe of the game, though. You can’t have multiple save files on the Wii version. The first Crystal Chronicles was great because, once you got everyone’s GBAs together, you just had a ton of files on the thing, and each person could raise their own hero, with new people just swapping out at will with their dude. I wanted that in this game, and it is not there. You can’t even move the save to an SD card and make multiple save files that way. Bleh.

Still, if you like that dungeon crawly action and can convince someone else to buy a copy too, I would have a hard time not recommending this game. It’s just solid co-op multiplayer fun. You can’t beat that.