#crystal project

yapper & listener

redraw of an old doodle that sparked cute silly scribbles about them getting ready for a fancy event of some kind. (before they were officially together yet, haha)

River Running Games has announced Metroidvania adventure RPG Crystal Project II for PC (Steam). A release date was not announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

About

Explore a seamless open world and search for keys to unlock your dream, making the land of Sycamore become as promised. Find new classes, learn new abilities, collect powerful equipment, and use your newfound strength and mind to overcome the world’s toughest challenges. Unlock new methods of travel to discover the farthest, untouched reaches of the land. …or become one of the few that dares to uncover the world’s greatest mysteries. Just make sure not to catch the attention of those that want to keep those secrets buried.

Key Features

The threat-based tactical combat of Crystal Project returns in a new world with new challenges.

Manage Threat to control which party member a monster will attack in this telegraphed combat system with no hidden information: preview turn order, damage, and probabilities.

Platform around an open world with no loading screens and no invisible walls. Find your own path forward.

No random encounters. No permanent missables. Explore at your own pace.

A distinct adventure: no need to play the original Crystal Project first.

What’s New?

Explore and conquer an entire new world in the land of Sycamore.

Even more build possibilities with new options like combat items, ability augments, and new equipment modifiers.

Discover entirely new classes, alongside remixed returning classes that feature new abilities and passives.

Looser weapon skill restrictions: weapon skills are now classified as either slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning.

Tune your playthrough to your tastes with more assist options and more challenge options.

New systems like snappier animations and new mechanics like summoning allies.

Get access to more teleport points by collecting multiple Home Point Stones.

Customize your party member appearance and clothing colors.

Actual fishing! Who knows what you’ll find…

And more.

Watch the announcement trailer below.

Announce Trailer

Ive been having a lot of fun with Crystal Project, a well made FF5-inspired RPG. The combat is very tightly designed and the exploration aspect is top notch. The art style put me off a bit at first, but I think it grew on me over time.

The game does a great job of slowly uncovering its breadth and letting you break its sequence through curious exploring. Lots of fun to search every part of its gigantic map for secrets. This is a game that loves hiding secrets within secrets within secrets. You might even occasionally stumble into a late game area, and exploring carefully could lead to finding items meant for the end of the game, giving your party a significant early game boost.

Exploring will often lead to surprise optional boss battles that are completely out of your league - but dying has few consequences in the game (you just lose a bit of money) and dying from bosses has no consequences at all, so you rarely feel truly punished for having explored too far, and its always worth it to have a peek at a boss battle.

Don't expect too much of a story. There is one, but it keeps a very light touch, this is mainly a game about exploring and fighting monsters. It does have characters and some personality, but dont expect something dense story wise.

It manages to avoid feeling like an open world game - it feels more like a linear game that just lets you break out of the confines of its intended path if you explore enough. It strikes a very good balance between having direction and having freedom. The world map just keeps expanding as you play, leading to many little shocks about the games' scope, a feeling you might be familiar with if you played Elden Ring.

The games combat uses a very well balanced, strategic system. Battles give you a lot of information to let you choose your actions carefully - you can see any enemies' next action in advance, and you even know who the enemy will attack next (notice the dotted lines in the screenshot above). Manipulating the enemies' current target is actually one of the fundamentals of the game- enemies choose their next target based on a "Threat" system which is entirely open to you as you fight, and many classes have abilities to help you manipulate this. Some class abilities also depend on the current threat state of a character - for instance, the rogues' many powerful skills only work if they are considered an enemy's bottom threat, and will otherwise always miss, which requires careful actions on your part.

The class system will be familiar if you played Final Fantasy 5 - you obtain new classes by exploring the world and finding large crystals, each unlocking a new one. The classes set a characters' stat growth on level-up, equippable items, main abilities and all have a unique "Innate passive" which are usually quite powerful (for instance, the base Cleric class receives a significant boost to all healing spells).

You can also add the abilities of a secondary class to your characters' moveset- like adding a clerics' healing spells to your Samurai. There is a lot of fun to be had mixing one class's abilities with anothers' passive boost - for instance, one class has an ability which makes the first action this character makes in a battle always target All enemies or All allies, allowing you to either massively boost your whole party or nuke the enemy party with a powerful spell usually meant for a single foe.

There are also passive abilities you can unlock from any class and assign regardless of a characters' current class, limited by a point cost system. These can range from a boost to max HP, to adding a poison effect to any weapon attacks, to allowing your character to equip a shield regardless of their class.

You can get very creative with the games' class system, there are countless ways to mix and match character abilities and classes to figure out some powerful strategy. The endgame has several challenges that might require you to make custom party setups just for them, turning the combat system into something resembling a kind of puzzle - though one with many possible solutions.

Boss battles have a way of feeling like a desperate struggle of improvising as your strategy falls apart - then winning by the skin of your teeth. This happens a lot. At least half of the boss battles for me ended with most of my party dead, and being one or two turns away from a full wipe-out.

I think the only real misstep is the games' analogue to chocobo breeding, introduced at the very end of the game. It feels tedious, I gave up on it after an hour of wasting my money on food for the creatures and not getting anywhere. Luckily it seems to be completely optional.

Hello! o/

If I may, what would your favorite team building RPGs be?

Hiiiiiiiiiii <3

OK SO

There's a dozen or so I could point to, but for now I'll spotlight 3 or so of my favorites, I'll try and be brief: