• Price: $39.99 USD (digital & physical)
• Developers: Dreams Uncorporated, SYCK
• Publisher: Maximum Entertainment
• Release Date: July 20, 2021

Content warnings: Rated T. Mild (rare) swearing, war, corruption, murder, xenophobia

Time travel is one of my favorite subjects in fiction, so the story and mechanics of Cris Tales really appealed to me. The game tells the story of Crisbell, a young woman who suddenly unlocks her powers as a Time Mage one day. The Time Empress wages war against the kingdoms in this world, and Crisbell and her new allies must hone their skills before they can face her.

Leaving the orphanage she grew up in, Crisbell will travel to new locations with her companions – including a dapper talking frog – on a pilgrimage of sorts to augment her powers. Each new town you enter is facing some serious problem that you’ll have to solve before you can get that power boost and move on to the next one.

In order to solve these problems, you need to use Crisbell’s “Time Hop” powers to send Matias the talking frog to either the past or future version of the town to overhear important conversations, grab a still-intact item before it had deteriorated, or to get an item that would’ve taken too long to wait for it to grow. It’s so cool seeing each town through the different lenses of the past, present, and future!

While a lot can be accomplished in towns, there are things you won’t be able to do unless you enter the areas outside of them. There are those who won’t want you to fix whatever is plaguing their town, though, and you’ll have to face many basic enemies before reaching the bosses.

But first, even the dungeon areas utilize Crisbell’s Time Mage powers; by “Restoring” or “Decaying” an object in the environment, you can create a bridge or discover a hidden object. I really liked how many different applications of her powers there were in the game.

Another one of those applications would naturally be in the turn-based battles. Although you eventually acquire 6 (battle) party members besides Crisbell, you can only use 3 in battle at a time. Sadly, I did not see a way to swap out characters in battle, and characters who do not participate in battle do not seem to earn experience.

I was pretty impressed by the variety of unique skill sets among party members. Crisbell’s Time Mage powers allow you to send an enemy into the past or future. (For some reason, you can only send enemies on the left to the past, and the ones on the right to the future; I wish this was different.)

If you poison an enemy and send them into the future, they’re very likely to die from all the poison damage that hits them all at once. Every enemy has their own elemental weaknesses; I really liked hitting an enemy with a water skill that inflicts “soak,” then using electricity on the next turn to take advantage of that status ailment.

Crisbell can eventually learn abilities that let her revert an enemy with regen status to their status from the previous turn, removing that status. Alternatively, Crisbell can revert the party’s status to remove any harmful effects (i.e. poison or doom).

I did wish that she had some more offensive skills, but overall her support and Time abilities were quite helpful and fun to use. Cristopher and Zas were my other two favorite party members to use, with his elemental attacks and her wild roulette wheels. It was nice to have special paired attacks with Crisbell and another party member, too.

One issue I had with the battle system was the requirement to press a button at the right time to land a critical attack or reduce the damage from an enemy strike. Even by the end of the game I still wasn’t very good at it, and I found “K” unusable due to my inability to get the timing down with his attacks.

It’s doesn’t make the game unplayable, but I think that some accessibility options would have been nice. Players can’t turn off the rumble in settings, so that can be a bit much since it happens a lot in battles. And finally, I didn’t love how I couldn’t retry a battle if I lost; I only lost one regular battle due to a silly mistake, but I lost a little bit of progress since I had to reload.

Critiques aside though, I really enjoyed the battle system. At first glance, one might look at the colorful, cartoony graphics and think that Cris Tales is an easy kid’s game. However, I found that battles were quite engaging and interesting. Bosses require special strategies to win, and I found some of them pretty challenging – especially once I got to the third new city.

Once you’ve completed a city’s main quest by making discoveries and then defeating the boss in the area, Crisbell is asked what she thinks the city should do going forward to ensure a better future. These decisions will determine how the story ends; completing every side quest in a city is the only way to make the best choice appear.

There are only 10 side quests, so it really isn’t a big ask. One or two of them seem to be somewhat missable if they aren’t completed right away though, so I would always create a separate save upon arriving at each town. Unfortunately, there isn’t a New Game+ option, so if you don’t do it right the first time you’d have to start from scratch the next time you played.

Thankfully I managed to complete everything, which allowed me to view the “best” ending. Again, some players may not anticipate some fairly heavy topics in the game’s story due to its aesthetics. But as mentioned in the content warnings above, it covers war, corruption, murder, class issues, and more.

I don’t know if I’d say that everything felt like it was resolved, and the ending wasn’t necessarily my favorite. That being said, there were some plot twists I wasn’t expecting over the course of the game, and I really, really liked the characters.

I especially enjoyed Willhelm and Cristopher’s interactions due to Willhelm’s snarky comments. Zas was probably my favorite character, as I liked her design, abilities, and personality – she’s so awkward and silly. Love her!

They even added a content update several months after the game’s initial release, which added a new dungeon and side quest, enemies, a Colosseum feature, and best of all: an additional party member (who you’ll have met before by the time they join you towards the end of the game).

That update also improved the loading times by about 30%, which I understand were a frequent complaint around launch. I’m not very patient with loading times, but I do think that they’re fairly quick for the most part now. The performance did seem to suffer a little in the new content areas, but overall I think they did a good job addressing players’ concerns from the launch version.

Where the game really shines for me is in its artistic elements, which are incredibly impressive. There are multiple animated cutscenes, which are lovely and have smooth animation. They even animated Matias in battles – I loved the way he’d shake pom poms to cheer you on and make threatening gestures with boxing gloves as you fight!

Small details like those really bring the characters to life. I really think this is one of the loveliest games I’ve played on Switch – the animation, character designs and models, and backgrounds are so appealing to me.

I really liked the soundtrack, too. And speaking of the audio features, the game offers fully voiced dialogue! I don’t think there was a single line that went unvoiced, and the quality of the voice acting was great, in my opinion. It’s pretty rare to have a fully voiced game instead of just the important lines, so kudos to them!

Cris Tales will probably take you about 30-40 hours to complete. It was definitely a good way for me to start the new year. While it isn’t perfect, it still has a lot going for it. The artistic direction, likable characters, and unique battle (and field) mechanics are just a few of the components that make this easy for me to recommend.

8/10