Crystal Story

The character names are the secondary characters from Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Interesting....

I've noticed a handful of such "genre mash" RPG games being released lately. What happened to the old-school RPG genre?

@bwansy: have you even tried playing this game? I think you'll find a pretty classic RPG experience.

Don't judge a game by the screenshots. The match-3 game you see in the screenshot is a sidequest mini-game.

One thing it really badly needs is the ability to check the bestiary in combat; otherwise you've no incentive to play particularly tactically.

Heh, I took a glance at the game on the main page, and at the picture--and realized all the characters' names were from Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. I've thinking for a while that someone should make a game as homage to Mystic Quest for its 20th or 25th anniversary . . . not that it was a great game, but it was my first RPG, and probably a lot of other people's too, plus it was memorable, even if it wasn't so great. So maybe I'll take a shot at this.

Very adorable, but be careful! There's no conformation for (m)any thing(s). So, hypothetically speaking, you could go to the inn and reset your points by accident instead of resting your party like you intended.

There's a new version up now that should fix a few bugs.

Aw, drat. I saw the screenshots and hoped it'd be an RPG with a combat system that doesn't involve choosing "attack" from a menu a hundred thousand times.

Here's an interesting little bug. When you travel from screen to screen in a dungeon it randomly respawns chests. If you keep hopping back and fore between two empty screens you could eventually have all of the money in the world.

For a game about a company of mercenaries, money seems particularly useless. I played through to lvl 33, skipping almost all of the fights, and still had enough to upgrade all of my equipment at the blacksmith (about 1/10 of what I accumulated) and grab far more potions and ethers than I could use; It'd be nice to have expensive items in the shop to work toward or something.

I want to be able to buy a lvl 1 Ragnarok sword for 1000000! Can't find one except for through random drops now.

Speaking of which, after getting about mid-lvl (enough to where you could have 20 AP), every enemy team will fall to you if you fight intelligently (stuns, debuffs, party buffs, ect.) and you can go as deep as you want without having to worry about new enemies to crush you.
It's a good way to get equipment many levels above your parties.

And then, sidequests having a level requirement before you can attempt them annoys me to no end. A floor reached requirement I can see, but I dodge the random encounters, and rather well I might say. I'm deeper than the final boss (should the fact there's a final boss be spoiled?) and still can't save the kitty. D:

Is the fact that the weapons have levels normal for an RPG? I've played a few and I've never seen this before. It is annoying to me, to not be able to tell if one thing is better than another because of the fact that it is actually better or if it is simply because it is at a higher level. Meaning, I would want to be able to compare the two things at the same level - the better item might come off as worse just because it isn't upgraded.

Is there any way to tell which level you haven't fully explored? Status keeps telling me I'm one short,and I don't know which one it is.

I've noticed that how well I do against monsters often depends on who goes first. If I go first, I can kill them all most of the time without getting hurt. If they go first, an area attack can annihilate my entire party or most of it, leaving the rest extremely vulnerable.

@lucyolsen

Disgaea is the first rpg I know of to implement such a mechanic (you would literally travel into the item and go down 'levels' aka random maps. Leveling an item from 1-100 could take awhile, though there were ways of streamlining the process for maximum stat gain. Combined with the myriad of other leveling mechanics, Disgaea might as well be known as "Level Up: The Game". Fun times though.

As for determining item worth regardless of level, it seems that every item of the same type and rarity will have the equal core stats (mdef for head gear, def for armor, etc.). The same stat growths per level for the additional stats the equipment might raise are likewise similar. For example: if one armor raises speed +10 while another raises crit +5, you can assume the crit would be +10 when that item is the same level as the other (assuming same rarity).

It is a pretty basic system, but it seems to work well enough. I agree it could be presented in a bit more user friendly manner, though considering how forgiving the game is overall, a few stat points here and there are really a minor issue at best.

Still have plenty left to do with this game, and I wager it will eat up yet more of my time. I hope to see more games from the creator in the future.

Whats a good easy way to lvl up?

Oh c'mon, "as with all RPGs, the combat plays a big role"? Either you have never played a real CRPG or forgotten about it. Try Planescape: Torment or Baldur's Gate 2 and repeat that. You can get through those games with very little grinding and mostly talking and character development, as opposed to Crystal Story as a typical JPRG which tells a fixed story with a little combat inbetween. This doesn't mean Crystal Story is bad, but it's a very different genre and has little to do with true roleplaying. Even Nethack has more intricate story development than this one, and there aren't even any characters in there...

I don't understand how I'm supposed to beat the expert lvl of Zombie Defense when the game doesn't register half of my clicks.

& the zombies still loom closer. -_-

What's up with that lag?