YMMV / Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

• Awesome Music: The game is packed full of Celtic folk music that help give it a lot of charm and personality. Some standouts include Magi Is Everything (the Moschet Manor theme,) Kaze no Ni (the opening theme,) Treasure Sleeping In The Sand (the Lynari Desert theme,) Monster's Round Dance (the boss battle theme) and Sad Monster (the first Final Boss theme.)
• Breather Boss: The Cave Worm isn't this initially being a tanky beast with powerful physical attacks, but he becomes this on subsequent cycles. Unlike all other bosses in the game who get new attacks and support monsters, all the Cave Worm gets is improved stats. His battle is essentially the same on each cycle, making it easy to master fighting it and outright become a pushover in the endgame.
• Critical Dissonance: IGN gave Remastered an abysmal 3 out of 10 when most other reviewers gave it a 6 or 7. Many fans will agree that the changes to multiplayer, particularly the removal of couch co-op, were poor choices. Few will agree that the score is fair though, finding that the game still contains enough redeeming qualities. And unfortunately, IGN is the first score that shows up in a Google search of the game. Even higher scores from other reviewers are mildly criticized, such as neglecting to mention the environmental storytelling aspect of the game and focusing on the bare-bones main plot.
• Designated Villain: Jack Moschet may have a bit of an attitude problem, but that doesn't really excuse the Tipa caravan breaking into his house, killing all his chefs and then beating up him and his wife to get some myrrh.
• Franchise Original Sin: The game, particularly the endgame, was notable for requiring a good deal of grinding to acquire the needed (or ideal) stats, artifacts, and items. Fans hoped Square Enix would fix it with the Remastered Edition, and they didn't: only the host of a multiplayer caravan gets the Myrrh. This means that any players attempting to progress through the game evenly with a friend must run the same dungeon at least twice and up to four times depending on the number of friends they have, which ironically has the side effect of actually increasing the grind compared to the original game.
• Game-Breaker: The Cure Ring, or any other Magic Ring, as they can make it to where you don't need Magicites anymore. The Cure Ring can make food items nearly moot.
• Good Bad Bugs: While it was likely unintentional, a known glitch in the Remastered Edition made it so that if you played multiplayer with someone who has already completed the puzzle to unlock the Unknown Element in Lynari Desert as the host, the game treated your file as if you had already completed it yourself. This meant that when you played the single player version of Lynari Desert yourself, you can bypass the puzzle completely and change your chalice's element to Unknown right at the very start, never having to worry about getting roadblocked by the miasma streams or having to look up the solution to Gurdy's verses. Said glitch was patched out in an update as of September 30, 2020.
• Nightmare Fuel: Tida. It's a ghost town covered in fog, insect silk, Carrion Worms, and skeletons. All of its signs are notices for preparing for the Crystal Festival and welcoming their caravan home, after the opening cutscene noting the caravan failed.
  • The fact that so many people lose their memories. This can happen to the player character in the endgame.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • When playing multiplayer, instead of having a moogle carry the chalice for you, a player has to do it. This renders the player unable of doing anything but moving until they drop the chalice. And their movement speed drops.
  • The moogle isn't exactly safe from this either. After spending some time in a level, the moogle will get tired and complain, asking you to carry the chalice instead. When this happens, the moogle's speed noticeably drops, and your character will outrun the moogle, causing him or her to run headlong into the miasma. This means you have to let the moogle drop the chalice for a bit and waste your time, or carry it around (which leads right into said problems above) and be prepared to drop it again when you come across enemies. And when it says it is ready to carry it again, giving it back to the moogle right then and there will only cause it to tire out again not even thirty or so seconds later. Worse is if you go into certain areas without altering your moogle's current fur (you'll need to shave it if you plan on heading out to Lynari Desert or Mount Kilanda, and you'll have to grow it back out for some of the chillier areas like Selepation Cave), he'll tire out MUCH quicker.
    • It should be noted that the moogle usually only has to drop the chalice for about five seconds before he's ready to carry it again. Though, that makes the player wonder why SE bothered with the tiring mechanic in the first place. It's a real pace-breaker.
    • This is particularly irritating if you're in the stage's boss fight, which can take quite a while on single-player.
  • Artifact circles can vary on this because even when following bonuses, you have to sometimes aim for the right amount of points or you get a prize circle that's objectively worse than the lower ones. In Conall Curach, for example, the Ring of Cure is in sets 2 and 4 on cycle one. Set 2 can nab the player an artifact that boosts magic by 5 while the highest amount of points gets a +3 to magic.
  • The Remastered Edition changes to the game's multiplayer created some new ones:
    • Only the player hosting the party will collect the drop of Myrrh for the caravan, and thus only the host gets a letter, as the rest of the party just sits around. If you're not the host, you'll at least get to pick from the artifact wheel, but you'll have to clear the level in single player or as a host yourself to get the mMyrrh. For co-op modes with dedicated caravans and friends, this leads to an abundance of backtracking and replaying to keep everybody up to snuff. This will drain players to see the long levels four times over such as Selepation Cave, Lynari Desert, and especially Conall Curach.
    • Multiplayer is limited to Dungeons only, meaning the on-the-road events have no randomized decision making and you can't run around together in towns.
    • No local co-op, for a game that became famous for local co-op.
    • You can't communicate bonus conditions to your allies, so if a teammate is acting weird, you have no idea if they're being stupid or fulfilling their own bonus condition. Woe be unto you if that's a detrimental bonus condition, such as "don't use magic" for a Yuke character.
    • The multiplayer is region locked.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: "Solo multiplayer" mode — playing in multiplayer mode with a GBA, but only one player — removes Mog and the miscellaneous other Anti-Frustration Features of single-player mode, substantially increasing the difficulty of the game.
• Squick: Apparently, when you forget something, it's because Lady Mio 'nibbles' on your memories.
• Surprise Difficulty: The first two cycles can be relatively manageable if you're paying attention; but if you're not farming artifacts when you can early on, your late game can be hell when multiple mooks are able to knock off tons of health relatively quickly.
• Superlative Dubbing: The only voice actor in the original release of the game is the narrator, played by Donna Burke, but she still pulls out some very well-acted narrations (and of course, has an Irish accent to fit the game's Celtic theme). Her singing voice is pretty good, too. Remastered adds full voice acting to cutscenes and Voice Grunting to NPC interactions, which are still well-acted even if some fans would say the Moogles weren't given appropriate voices.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The reveal that the seemingly funny pair of traveling Clavat brothers, Gurdy the Con Man and the honest Hurdy. Turns out they're not brothers at all. Rather they're actually the same person. A Clavat suffering from Identity Amnesia who's trying to recover his lost memories.
  • The Lilty warrior, known as the Black Knight's tragic end. He's eventually killed by the child Lilty, Leon Esla, who believed the knight had killed his father. Sadly, it's discovered that the Black Knight actually was little Leon's father. The boy never learns the truth, but his mother does.
  • The fate of De Nam, a researcher studying the miasma who befriends the players and occasionally sends them letters on his progress. Sadly, his experiments lead him into trying to adapt to the miasma by slowly ingesting it. Eventually he sends a garbled letter asking the players to come to Conall Curach. Upon arriving in Conall Curach, the players will encounter a monster that drops a bandana that belonged to De Nam. Which sadly implies that De Nam was either killed by the monsters, or he was transformed into a monster himself.
  • The games are adorable, the characters quirky and endearing... but the writers have a terrible fondness of killing everyone you love, and some people you don't. Frequently.
• That One Level:
  • Conall Curach. In terms of story, atmosphere, music, themes, and aesthetic, it all comes together wonderfully and even though it's a bleak swamp, the level's artistic choices combined with the story into it make for a great story level. Sadly, that doesn't correlate well to gameplay! Conall Curach is incredibly annoying due to being ridiculously large maze crammed with dead ends, and having pretty much the same scenery throughout, meaning you have no idea if you've taken a wrong turn along the way or not. Not to mention the majority of enemies there are Demonic Spiders. To top it all off it has one of the nastiest bosses in the game: the Dragon Zombie.
  • Rebena Te Ra can be this, especially for Lilties. Let's run down the list: tons of undead and flying enemies fluttering about the ruins meaning Holy magic gets spammed like no tomorrow (which is a treat for the sluggish Lilty spellcaster), numerous puzzles that require players to take hits to solve leaving them vulnerable, and a puzzle with such strict timing that's borderline pointless to solve when the artifacts and prizes behind said wall are found easier in other dungeons. At least the Lich at the end is a relatively simple fight...unless you're a Lilty.
• That One Boss:
  • The Dragon Zombie, especially on cycles two and three. His arena is incredibly small so it's very difficult to maneuver around and his minions are Stone Sahagins which take forever to kill. What also adds to it is that he's a boss you can clearly tell is to be defeated with magic, so the developers put in the sweet loot for the Lilties against him. Go figure, right? Similarly, the Lich takes significantly more damage after having Holy cast on her as well as losing half her health once per fight if you cast Gravity on her.
  • The Antlion of Lynari desert is no joke in the slightest. It hits very hard, and has a petrification attack that gets through the first layer of protection. He also leaves little for evasive actions and his helpers are the obnoxious stone scorpions in later cycles.
  • The Lich if you're playing as a Lilty becomes this. Remember, Lilties excel in heavy physical combat but are the slowest and weakest when it comes to magic. And given one needs to focus on their magic to defeat the Lich, the fight can go from straightforward to being a nightmare.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The original GameCube release displayed a host of stunning visuals that were rather uncommon for the console; with crisp textures and resolution, some decent fur effects, accurate reflections on water, gorgeous magic and energy effects, detailed specular maps on metals and other smooth materials, and even real time self-shadowing (many early titles for the next console generation didn't even have this). The Remastered Edition is even better in this regard.

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