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.