Cris Tales

Cris Tales is a fantasy adventure akin to a fairy tale in both narrative and setting. It’s an amazing experience accompanied by memorable characters, an addictive battle system, and wonderful discoveries. Every moment of the gameplay pushes the RPG to new heights, which is only hindered by lengthy load times and lack of direction for some missions. However, if you’re looking for a callback to retro RPGs, this is one game you absolutely need to play.

Cris Tales is an incredible take on the JRPG with impressive time powers, but the loading times and framerate on Switch are disappointing.

If you listen to Cris Tales talk, it sings with love for its influences. But sometimes, maybe we can love too many things. The game is remarkable on a variety of fronts, notably its look, its sound, and its love for Colombia. All of that works. But it feels the weight of its many influences. Eventually, when the developers throw so many things at the wall, it starts to get messy, with a story that tries to do too many things, combat that never fully lives up to its potential, and a bloated run time. Still, I’d rather love too much than not enough. Cris Tales might talk about more than it should, but I kind of love it for that.

Overall, Cris Tales is a great turn-based RPG for fans of turn-based style gameplay. It’s an impressive piece of work from an indie company and one that I think many will enjoy. The load screens in the game are annoying, but it’s just about the only flaw that I can find since the rest of the game is so good. Old school RPGs fans will find much to enjoy here with the hard difficulty and classic turn-based style gameplay.

Cris Tales is a lot of fun, and a really solid title overall. It’s great to see that smaller indie studios are able to pick up the slack when it comes to delivering more classically inspired RPGs, and that they even have the creativity to go above and beyond what’s expected of them. While Cris Tales might be lacking a little bit here and there, anything bad is absolutely outshined by all of the good—you’ve got nothing to lose by checking this one out.

Cris Tales is a fantastic JRPG that blends enough traditional mechanics with new ideas to keep it feeling fresh and innovative. It features an engrossing world you’ll long for more hours to explore and absorb.

I'm hoping that Modus will continue to support the Cris Tales with patches to address some of its technical issues. Decreasing load times might be too much to hope for on Switch, but game-breaking bugs are another story. I feel optimistic about it because Cris Tales is too good of a game to leave things like this. It puts new spins on some classic JRPG elements and creates an aesthetic all its own, telling tales that are universal and troublingly timely. Technical flaws aside, Cris Tales is a potent blend of the best of the JRPGs that inspired it and fresh ideas from a unique and personal perspective. Playing it is like discovering a fantastic SNES RPG from another timeline (with much more advanced graphics), serving as both a love letter to the past and an invitation to push forward, and it is likely to capture the imaginations of anyone who embarks on Crisbell's journey.

Cris Tales on Switch is a unique gem of a game with stunning visuals and music, interesting mechanics, and a beautiful story. It is only held back by load times and its somewhat frustrating combat.

Cris Tales offers up a satisfying take on classic JRPG tropes while sprinkling in some interesting new gameplay ideas and an incredible art style. Though some aspects of combat can be frustrating and the pacing can occasionally feel like it’s wasting your time, we’d still give this one a recommendation to anyone looking for a cool new RPG for their Switch. Cris Tales does just enough to stick out from the pack and assert itself as a title worth adding to your library; JRPG aficionados should definitely give this one a shot.

I really hope the other platforms that Cris Tales has been released on have better performance, because those loading times alone take something special, and unfortunately undermine it. This is one of those rare times to me where technical issue really do mess with the experience, disrupting the carefully-structured panic and pulling players away from the breathtaking art. There's still a lot to love about Cris Tales, and the vision is beautiful and evocative. But we are in 2021 and battles in an JRPG shouldn't require a loading screen. No matter how beautiful and heartfelt they are.

With its innovative concept and charming artistic direction, the first title from independent studio Dreams Uncorporated has enough to convince fans of traditional turn-based RPGs looking for a unique experience with a solid foundation. In addition, the accessibility of the title represents an excellent introduction for those who would like to embark on their first J-RPG. Ultimately, Cris Tales sins mainly by some technical details to be reworked.

Its combat is less appealing, though, as there are too many random encounters and the combat mechanics end up becoming too repetitive, so there's a clear difference between the game's exploration and its combat. Overall this is a lovely game with a strong personality, and fans of JRPGs who don't mind a lot of random encounters will find plenty to enjoy.

Overall, this is a great game that is bogged down by a handful of issues. Many of the problems with this game come from the genre it’s replicating but Cris Tales still manages to add some new and exciting mechanics. Going forward it will be exciting to see what new and creative ideas Dreams Uncorporated thinks of next.

Cris Tales is an incredibly creative game with its own distinct identity. There are times when it can feel like it drags on a bit. It feels like something special. But it also feels like a game that, at least at the moment, needs a little bit more work. The Cris Tales Switch version feels like it is constantly loading for the smallest reasons and might occasionally crash. If Dreams Uncorporated and Syck can fix those issues. it will eventually be a must-play game.

Cris Tales isn’t going to set your world on fire, but it proves to be good turn-based RPG comfort food. If you don’t mind titles that drag a bit, this one is for you.

Cris Tales tells a charming JRPG tale in a gorgeous and weird world, but it's hobbled by incredibly monotonous combat. Its battles undoubtedly overstay their welcome, but this unique odyssey still manages to shine through them a bit thanks to its style, characters, and the inspired (non-combat) time travel mechanics that make it so memorable.

After finishing Cris Tales, I kept asking myself, "Was this game about time worth 20+ hours of my time?" Honestly, I don't think it was. [Issue #57 – January/February 2022, p. 72]

Cris Tales wanted to be a tribute to old school PlayStation JRPGs, but it fails to deliver interesting story and gameplay. It's not bad at all, but it's not very good either.

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.

Cris Tales is a joyous love letter to JRPGs, but limits itself to imitating the classics instead of attempting to elevate the genre. A plodding battle system ultimately causes the game to suffer. Cris Tales falls short of its lofty aims, but the zeal and indelible spirit of the game make it more than the sum of its parts.

Even if Cris Tales has an enchanting graphic style, a nice fighting system and a more than appreciable OST, the title suffers from its technical side. The more the game goes on, the more it becomes difficult to enjoy it because of too many loading times, a sometimes sluggish scenario, multiple futile back and forths, and a general slowness of the title.

While time magic serves an elegant and creative function throughout Cris Tales, it’s not a fully realized part of the game.

Cris Tales is an enchanting story wrapped in a gorgeous visual style, but lacks sustained imagination in gameplay. JRPG players will find enjoyment within, but those less patient may be turned off after a few hours.

There are a lot of clever ideas in this game, but the game exhausts most of its tricks well before it ends. I think it’s still worth playing, provided you enjoy RPGs to begin with. It’s just unfortunate that a game that blasts out of the gates with such vigor ends up so flat in its closing hours. Add in some technical issues specific to this version, and you have a real hit-or-miss affair.

Cris Tales has a lot of great ideas, and an incredible style, but none of it really coalesces into a game I want to play.