Crystal Story

Link to game

Here's another time sink.

Crystal Story is a drungeon crawler where you control four people in turn based anima-tastic combat.

There, I've saved you the trouble if that line scares you.

Alas, the game's storyline.  Your a band of mercs tasked by this narcissist to hunt down this witch, incapacitate her, and take a photo of her and your new employer being all badass and slaying her.  Yeah, it promises to be one of those wacky-shit humour games.  It even has all the hallmarks of a silly anima game, where your party consists of a dumbass, a serious chick, a greedy dude, and this girl with a bigass hammer that is obsessed with beating the shit out of things with said hammer (though she does remind me of Presea from Tales of Symphonia).

Guess who's who?

Course, you crawl along the dungeon known as the Evil Cave chasing this bitch's ass, to help an incompetent rich dude.  This all the while crawling a 'dungeon' with JRPG music blaring through the speakers.  It isn't terrible music per say, but it is blantant midi JRPG tunes.  Again, I've saved you the trouble.

Crawl, crawl, crawl... course I played ahead!

So its pretty obvious that this is a JRPG flash title, that had to make compromises like a town that's a menu screen and the dungeon crawler mechanics.

Its my happening kind of town!

Course, it has the 'well duh' amenities, like a place to 'sleep and magically be healed of wounds,' go though my stuff and characters, get quests to go ontop of the overriding storyline, shop, and go to the Evil Cave for some hot witch and monster action.

Now, there are some things that I like in the game that I think are awesome.  For one thing, the game lets you augment weapons and armor up to your current level, making them more powerful and doing amazing things with your character's builds.

I also really like that there are four character classes (fighter, mage, rogue, and healer) to get skills from, and that every character can put ability points in any three of these classes.  Points they earn from doing side quests and leveling up of course!  Now, as a character's build matters to what they can do you have the opiton to re-spec the characters (for a fee of course).

Now, there is a reoccurring side quest where a woman keeps losing her cat in dangerous dungeons, and there is one about shit getting stolen, that you can get at the tavern.  You can also go to randomly generated dungeons outside of the Evil Cave and feed your pet slime for new items.

Or play timed Bejeweled.. cuz doesn't everyone love Bejeweled?

Oh, did I mention:

Turn taking encounters!

It isn't quite so bad.  There are monsters in the rooms you are in, and if you can avoid hitting them you don't have to fight them... though hitting one monster will cause all the monsters in the room to fight you.

This game is an epic that takes a really long time to load (I though Sonny was hard on a computer) which I should expect from a flash game that wants to be a console game coded my Otakus on Newgrounds (yes, I know the link takes you to Kongregate, shut up).

It is one of those, where either you like it or you don't.  I had some fun with it, and while the difficulty curve is sloped so that the later game actually gets easier and not harder, I have to say this addicting adventure is worth a peek, but only if anima RPGs and crawlers are your thing.