Up to eight players can occupy a village, with up to four embarking on a caravan. For multiplayer games, each player must play the game with a Game Boy Advance. Trolling through each level with multiple players is a lot of fun, but managing all the information on the GBA and keeping your eye on the on-screen action takes some getting used to. This is where the simplicity of the gameplay is appreciated; if it were any more complex, then coordinating between your GBA and the television would be too tricky. Multiplayer Crystal Chronicles adventures are a ton of fun, but there's one major caveat that really detracts from it.

In order to fully enjoy a multiplayer adventure, your party pretty much has to play the entire way together. While it's possible for one or more of the players to continue on without the others, it doesn't make sense for anyone to get too far ahead of the others. The reason being is that the games difficulty is geared towards the highest-level character. So, if you play for four or five hours without your friends, they're going to have a difficult time keeping up with you. Depending on how much you've leveled up, the players lower than you will have an experience that ranges from challenging to so-grueling-it's-not-fun-at-all. This really limits the feasibility of multiplayer adventures. Most people will have a hard time coordinating two weeks of gameplay sessions with up to three friends. If you can, it'll be a blast, but I don't think most people that go to school or have a job will be able to play it with a group consistently. Again, if you can swing it, it'll be awesome.

Teamwork pays off.
The other problem I had with the game was its artificially inflated gameplay time. After the first four years of your adventure, you'll have to repeat the same quests at least three times before you're able to progress. If you were able to run straight through the game, it would take around ten hours to complete, but you need to spend hours leveling up enough for your character(s) to hack the final portions of the game. I would have preferred additional levels instead of having to play most of them three times over. With the required repetition, figure on 20 hours of gameplay.

I've saved my favorite part of Crystal Chronicles for the end of this review. This is one of the most charming games I've played in a long time. I love the graphical style. It totally reminds me of a modernized version of a 16-bit RPG. The character designs are excellent, and each race has cool and distinct features. The intermittent cutscenes that fill your adventure are fun to watch. The environments aren't as consistent; there are some really slick ones, but some fairly bland ones as well. As a whole, I really enjoyed the game's graphics.

Umm, is this Armageddon?
Crystal Chronicles' music, however, is even better than its graphics. I loved the compositions -- especially the ones where strings were the dominant sound. I haven't enjoyed a console soundtrack this much in years. There were times where I tolerated the game's repetition simply so I could enjoy its aesthetics.

Unfortunately, a wide variety of secondary features and superb graphics and sound aren't enough to compensate for Crystal Chronicles' gameplay flaws. The single-player game is too easy and the multiplayer game is too impractical. If Square had found a way to balance the multiplayer gaming, this would have been a fantastic title. As it is, it's still a good game that old-school Final Fantasy fans and action-RPG aficionados will enjoy. Just don't expect to be blown away.