While hopping onto the Xbox Live Marketplace yesterday to force another innocent soul into the cult of Peggle, I noticed something that could only be described as “curious.” Somehow, a Final Fantasy game had snuck its way onto XBLA—and it wasn’t just any Final Fantasy-based product. This new title, Crystal Defenders, was entirely based on the Final Fantasy Tactics (Advance) universe, my most preferred of Final Fantasy settings. So, knowing absolutely nothing about Defenders, and with the screenshots and marketplace description giving no clue as to what the game actually entailed, I downloaded Crystal Defenders if only to find out what the hell it was. Booting the game up, I was greeted by a selection from Hitoshi Sakimoto’s amazing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 soundtrack.
And after that, it all went downhill.
What I didn’t know is that Crystal Defenders is a tower defense game—at least, according to various online sources. I’ve played tower defense games, and they usually involve towers (or at least buildings) which need defended. Crystal Defenders has none of this; instead, the game involves placing units (a selection of the familiar FFT classes) with differing strengths around a path that waves of monsters will eventually walk down. The thing is, the monsters don’t really fight back, which makes for a pretty hilarious sight when a parade of seemingly ambivalent critters are brutally murdered by your team of heroes for merely walking from point A to point B. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this game takes place in Texas.
To some, the description I’ve given may make the game seem somewhat appealing—and I’m sure the Crystal Defenders concept could produce something similar to fun if the game didn’t feel so cheaply made. From the minute I booted it up, I knew Defenders was just a port of a cell phone game—and even for a modern cell phone game it looks pretty terrible. While the game uses sprites recycled (or perhaps inspired) by the portable Tactics games, Crystal Defenders manages to look much worse in a way that only cheaply-made Japanese cell phone games can. This general sense of shoddiness extends to the ugly menu system to the actual gameplay itself; it actually took me a few minutes to figure out which button actually started the game after setting up my units. And when this happened, I could only sit back in dismay as I realized that Square was essentially selling a turret placement simulator for 800 friggin’ Microsoft points.
Oh, and there’s nothing more soothing than hearing the same “thwack” sound of your unit hitting an enemy repeated every tenth of a second. Crystal Defenders may be the first accurate reproduction of what a dryer full of tennis balls sounds like.
What makes this all so tragic is that Square attached the Final Fantasy Tactics name to this awful product, and that’s a name that still has some dignity left. I ask you, why couldn’t Crystal Defenders have been a licensed Secret of Mana product? That’s the form crappy Square games used to take for many, many years.
Related Links:
Square-Enix's Coup Brings Back Memories
Brave New Wi-Fi World: Square-Enix Might Just Change the Way We Play Nintendo Games
Square-Enix's Prez Sez: "Japan needs to be #1 in gaming again, homeslices."