probably not going to appreciate this game to its fullest. Granted, only once in my life

did I have the opportunity to play Crystal Chronicles with a truly full party, but the

experience still ranks on my “If I have the time and money and three complacent friends”

list. There’s no substitute for it. The teamwork necessary, the coordinated movement

to stay within the aura of the chalice, the trading and dealing to make sure all your

members are well-equipped and battle-ready... It’s like D&D, only Final Fantasy flavored,

and running on your GameCube.

In a world filled with poisonous Miasma (and similarities to Final Fantasy IX, but those

are left as an exercise for the reader), caravans full of adventurers criss-cross the land,

searching for the magical substance known as myrrh to keep their villages safe. Your

party of up to four represent one of these caravans, travelling through dungeons to find...

trees. Trees guarded by giant enemy crabs and Malboros and whatnot. Defeat these bosses

and you gain a drop of Myrrh for your chalice (popularly known as the Bucket by depraved

individuals with no sense of modesty), obtain three drops and your village is safe for another

year. While you can play the game solo with a moogle maintaining your bucket, the real

selling point of the game is the multiplayer, which requires each party member to have their

own Game Boy Advance, connected to the GameCube via a link cable. The controls are simple:

the L and R buttons cycle through your customizable command list, A performs the selected command,

B interacts with objects and picks up the spoils of war, and select allows for direct

interaction with the GBA, to set commands, check inventory, and view various other information.

It’s a multiplayer RPG, it’s just not massive or online. It demands that the players

be in the same room, and to that end demands communication in real-time as one player might

have the area map, but another has the positions of the enemies. Coordinated spellcasting,

likewise, results in drastically increased effects, and you’ll have to get along to

transfer and trade weapon and armor recipes and the materials required to craft them.

Through the years, your character continues to develop, through stat bonuses from items

rather than by a level system, and can even be loaded onto a memory card and transferred

to another system to take part in further adventures. You can even play multiplayer

mode alone - as I’ve had to this entire time - if you want to do some solo adventuring

or item hunting. It’s a massive paradigm shift, bolstered by a great soundtrack and

maybe the best visual display on the ‘Cube, and one that later games bearing the Crystal

Chronicles name simply have not been able to live up to. I don’t want to buy two more

GBAs and Link Cables, but every time I brush up against this title, that temptation rears

its ugly head.