Cris Tales (Switch) Review

When Cris Tales showed up out of nowhere, it immediately grabbed everyone’s attention with its stunning art style from the indie studio Dreams Uncorporated. Understandably there has been a bit of a wait, but we don’t need the ability to mess with time. You can play Cris Tales right now! Now let’s take the time and have a look at the game.

Cris Tales begins with a fight out by a farm. All you know is you’re Crisbell, Cristopher joins your party, and you have to stop some Goblins. While demonstrating the turn-based combat, it’s not long before you take a step back and find out what’s happening. Crisbell discovers that she has the power to use time crystals with the help of a talking frog named Matias. Having to use her powers to save her town, Crisbell and her friends must go on a quest to find out more about her powers and how to stop the Time Empress. Along the way, your party will grow, with Willhelm the Time Mage joining Crisbell and Cristopher to help her learn to use her newfound time crystal abilities. When Cris Tales gets going, it becomes the grand fantasy adventure the trailers give a glimpse of, with a few twists to keep you on your toes. Fans of JRPGS or time travel stories might be able to guess some way ahead, but they still manage to make it an enjoyable time getting there.

The ability to see through time plays a big part throughout. Crisbell can see past, present and future all at once, like looking at one scene through three different lenses. To improve the present or future, you might need to peek back in the past. It’s a fantastic mechanic, which gets utilised in all kinds of ways. Early on, you’re sometimes shown you’ll have to make a hard choice of what you can change. Although it’s not always one or the other, it can just take more work to make both positive outcomes work.

Now it’s a completed game; the most instantly notable thing about Cris Tales is that it looks amazing, utilising an art style that feels like Samurai Jack made into a game. Every character is distinct, within a beautiful world that continues to impress throughout. The developers did a great job of bringing out such lovely Columbian influences beyond the visuals.

Combat is turn-based, with Mario RPGesque Action Commands, which, when timed right, allow you to do more damage or block/parry anything incoming. It took me a while to get used to the different timings of different characters’ weapons, but I got there. I did find the blocking/parry prompts harder to get right. When some attacks do significant damage, it’s hard to practice.

Crisbell’s time powers play into the combat, too, being able to send parts of the battlefield back or forward in time. An early example is using water magic on a near-unstoppable metal shield. Send the enemy into the future, causing the metal to rust and weaken. Or send strong enemies back to the past where they are younger and not so strong, or send poisoned enemies into the future to take even more damage. There are some exciting ways these powers are used, and these fights liven up the combat, and then there’s the rest of the combat. The fights outside of the more interesting boss battles aren’t bad; they tend to feel longer than they need to be. This feels like a good time to take the conversation to the real issue here, and that’s time.

It always felt like I was spending too much of it waiting on Cris Tales for a game where time is everything. While we’ve all come to expect load times to some degree, Cris Tales has one of the infrequent occasions where they impact the game as a whole. Load times pop in way too often and always feel too long. The shortest time is 10 seconds. Everywhere you go, you are greeted by the loading screen/animation; every time you go in and out of combat, you’ll have to wait. Because the enemy encounters out in the field happen randomly, you’ll be hit with the dreaded loading a lot. Often you won’t even know whether it’s the beginning of a fight or if you suddenly loaded a new cutscene. It’s always abrupt. Ultimately it really hurts the flow of the game.

Harkening back to an older era of RPGs, there’s no autosave here. The onus is on you to remember to save whenever you can. If you lose a fight, then it’s game over and back to your previous save, losing any progress. I understand when developers want to make games feel like they used to, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of accessibility or the player’s time. It’s been great seeing games allow you to jump right back into a fight, especially when some RPG fights can take a while.

This is, unfortunately, a recurring theme for Cris Tales, at least on the Switch. Even getting past the very regular loading screen issues and lack of autosave, other minor issues would usually be easier to ignore. Moving around the world can feel slow, Crisbell never feels like she’s in a rush, and her froggy companion Matias is even worse. Even the dialogue takes its time, although I guess it’s so you can enjoy all that voice work on display.

Now that’s all out of the way, let me get back to what does work for Cris Tales. The game doesn’t look lovely; it also sounds great. Whether it’s the soundtrack or the voice cast, and from memory, most of the game is voice acted. Honestly, Cris Tales has been one of the more conflicting games I have played for some time now.

Cris Tales is a game I was hoping I could heartily recommend. The game’s lovely visuals deserve praise; they deliver even on the Switch. The adventures of Crisbell, the time mage and friends are more than suitably grand for an epic JRPG. Unfortunately, the loading times absolutely drain all of the magic out of this game on the Switch. If the other consoles perform better, then definitely check it out there. It truly is a shame technical issues like this hamper the game; it draws even more attention to other problems. I really do hope devs Dreams Uncorporated bring us some more fantastic game worlds. We might have to wait for an upgraded Switch, however.