CRYSTAR Chapter 2 Ordeal 3

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amoeba_dot_blue

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Published on August 31, 2021 1:31:43 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNBr_PzU4TA

Game:

Crystar (2018)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 41:11

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This series is intendend to present a complete playthrough of CRYSTAR, a game developed by Gemdrops Game Studios (http://www.gemdrops.co.jp/) and published internationally by Spike Chunsoft (https://spike-chunsoft.com) in 2019.

Here is more information from other sources.

Review (in part): Crystar (Sony PlayStation 4)
Review by Matt S. (http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/)

It's important that we draw a distinction between "melancholia" and "sadness", "misery", and other such synonyms. The dictionary definition has the terms at roughly parallel, but in literature and other art forms, they're really very different things.

My favorite quote in defining melancholia comes from an author that, to my great regret, I have never actually read. Italian writer, Italo Calvino, described it as "sadness that has taken on lightness." Poetic stuff, that. Victor Hugo (who I hope we are all familiar with) had a more blunt way of describing it, as "the happiness of being sad." Why start this review with a discussion on melancholia, you may ask? Because that's exactly what Crystar is, and Crystar is beautiful.

Hatada Rei wakes up to discover that she has become a butterfly in some kind of afterlife. There's been a disaster in the real world and Rei, as well as her sister, Mirai, have ended up in a rather tranquil, but desolate place. That doesn't last long, though, as they soon find themselves back in human form. Then a demon shows up and Rei, in trying to defend herself from it, accidentally kills her sister. This, understandably, leaves her desolate, until two more demons show up (together, their names imply Mephistopheles, as in "from the classic Goethe play, Faust") to form a contract (see?) with Rei. If she does their bidding and destroys the revenants and other monsters of purgatory (not hell), Mirai can be resurrected.

And so Rei starts off on her quest, meeting some other hunters along the way, while slowly piecing together what's really going on and what she's really doing to the world and those around her. Given the clear literary inspirations that Crystar draws inspiration from, you can probably guess that there's plenty of tragedy involved.

Rei's power - the power the demons are interested in her for - come from her tears crystalising into magical power. Yes, Rei has to cry in order to power up, and if that sounds like the most sorrowful gameplay mechanic you've ever come across, that's because it is. How Rei gets the waterworks going is conveyed through impressive writing and storytelling, too. Each of the monsters that she puts down are in fact the souls of the once living, and in killing them she's wiping them from existence with no hope of the resurrection that Mirai is promised. Unfortunately for Rei, as she kills them she also learns of their stories. Some are true monsters - one of the first you come across is a serial killing rapist that specialises in little girls - and learning their story doesn't exactly inspire sympathy. Others, however, are tragic little stories (and should come with content warnings that the game doesn't actually mention ahead of time), that are more than enough to get the emotions flowing. The main stories - the ones that convince Rei to cry - are given full cut scenes, and can be incredibly emotional.

Almost as impactful are the allies that Rei meets along the way. She'll end up with a small party of followers that help her tackle the dungeons, and each of those characters has their own emotive and tragic stories to share. I don't want to give these stories or characters away, because part of the impact of Crystar is how the characterisation can be genuinely surprising, but suffice to say that I was glued to this game because of its powerful, rich, and quite unique characters. They were personalities that I simply was not expecting, and that doesn't happen often when you play as many JRPGs as I have.

Everything about Crystar is structured around building those characters and sense of sorrow. The soundtrack is beautifully emotive, but rarely overt, instead working quietly in the background to dull the senses and induce a dream-like haze. This approach matches up nicely with the environments with their abstractions and angles that almost call to mind the German expressionist style of early cinema. It couldn't be a more appropriate form of cinema to crib ideas from, As the genre is defined: "German expressionism was an early twentieth century German art movement that emphasised the artist's inner feelings or ideas over replicating reality, and was characterised by simplified shapes, bright colours and gestural marks or brushstrokes," and this certainly applies to the environmental aesthetic of Crystar.

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