Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles & Nostalgia

I mean, I get the sentiment. Playing Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles by yourself is, arguably, the "wrong" way to play the game. It's simple to pick up and play, the levelling system is obnoxiously centred around having more than one player with you, material hunting for equipment is awfully grindy, and boss fights are nightmarishly difficult. The odds are stacked against you; I get it. But, after finally playing (so many years of waiting) Crystal Chronicles with four players recently, I can't say that one experience is inherently better to the other. Different, sure, but the more abstract qualities of play and the experiential nature of these two modes make equally enjoyable - and equally valid - experiences.

More so than any other multiplayer game, Crystal Chronicles develops a remarkable sense of travel and community. This is conveyed primarily through the narrative conceit itself. You're not so much embarking on an epic quest from point A to point B, but travelling to three different levels per year before looping back to your village and starting all over again. You travel with an old-fashioned caravan across worn out roads and through lived-in spaces. A diary system tracks your progress upon notable discoveries with flavourful text written in a personal, first-person style. Beautiful music with long-forgotten instruments play all manner of medieval tunes that evoke timeless images of adventures long past. Square-Enix nail all the more romantic, intangible aspects of travel so perfectly, but manage to leave a few holes to let the player fill in with their imagination. It's the type of game where you can imagine you and your party members huddled around a crackling campfire at night, looking up at a starry night sky, and talking about all manner of things until the wee hours of the morning.

For this reason, single-player is frighteningly lonely and overwhelmingly terrifying. The responsibility of collecting enough myrhh to rejuvenate the crystal protecting your village weighs far more heavily on your mind. Levels feel longer and more arduous; teeming with wildlife far more aggressive and dangerous when they only focus on you. Tactics change from the wild, agressive attacking of a four man party to a more measured, coaxing of individuals to engage you one at the time. Bosses are hulking behemoths that are almost exclusively beaten down with hit and run tactics as you carefully count out the frames of your attack animation. Even level ups shifts focus from collecting the simple stat boosting artefacts to the more permanent health upgrades and spell skills, since far greater stat boosts can be found with armour and weapon upgrades.

But, more importantly, your journey through the world of Crystal Chronicles feels more important travelling by yourself. The beautiful art style can be absorbed at a more leisurely pace, and hard fought battles feel much more satisfying when you pull your caravan up to the nearest town over to barter and trade with the locals. The brief, random encounter cutscenes with other caravans as you travel from level to level feel warm and lighthearted but intensely transient. Nothing feels solid and reassuring. It shifts focus away from the familiar and the reliable and lets you consistently absorb wonderful new environments. The Legend of Zelda is consistently praised for its spirit of adventure, but its dedication to habitual, world-building has you routinely returning to some places over and over again during the course of adventure. While Crystal Chronicles drops you back at your village at the end of every game year, the narrative elements of your stable family at home and the gradual changes in earlier levels as the years pass by, give a greater sense of time passed by. Funnily enough, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword achieves the same fluidity of time via Link's consistent returns to his home village of Skyloft, but apparently that game is too linear or something, I don't know. The internet - it hates a lot of things.

Multiplayer in Crystal Chronicles feels like a party. There's a greater sense of forward momentum as your party barrels through levels at breakneck speeds, there's camaraderie and competition, communication - the world suddenly feels like a happier place than before. Teamwork rears its [ugly?] head at every opportunity with spell stacking, careful party composition, and a communal aspect of material gathering. Team roles shift at a moments notice depending on the severity of battles. The rigid and careful planning of single-player is thrown out the window in favour of a more adaptive, flexible play style.

A lot of the more romantic aspects of the game are lost in the process. The soothing music is washed over by near constant chatter, the methodical and gently placed story telling feels out of place in an environment that now requires almost constant action and quick reflexes. In fact, you don't even want to watch it; you skip over it. There are monsters to kill and levels to be beaten - you don't have time to stop and breath for a little while. Unless that stopping means armour and weapon upgrading at the nearest town.

Eventually though, and by the very nature of social gatherings, you have to stop playing and move on with your lives. All the GBAs and Link Cables have to be packed up and taken away with their respective owners. Your multiplayer playthrough is frozen in time until a later date. Returning to your singleplayer file feels ever more lonely, and the textual cries of your friendly, chalice-carrying Moogle can't hope to match the anguished sighs of a party member who's forced into the same deed. Your multiplayer adventures feel like they happend an eternity ago; a long lost memory.

Which is ultimately what Crystal Chronicles is all about - memory. The game timestamps your achievements, small and large, with a diary entry that you can read at any time. The amount of memories you have at the very end of the game determines whether or not you can complete the game. This theme is supported beyond the mechanics of the game, too. The visual style, the intensely melodic music sculpted with ancient instruments, the dense in-game lore - every element of the game is efficiently crafted to engage with familiar, deep-seated tropes of fantasy and mythology. It's a living artefact. It goes beyond the simple nostalgia play and referentialism in the mainline Final Fantasy entries to create manufactured nostalgia. It's a remarkable achievement to make something feel old without actually being old.

What happens in video game narratives is just as important as what happens while we experience the story. The memories we create while playing games are so often fragmented from the games themselves. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles remains one of the few to thematically tie the two together.