YMMV / Crystar

• Awesome Music: can cry, composed and sung by Nagi Yanagi, is a very strong and emotional opening theme.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The Demon Twins' true identity being Mephistopheles, as if their names weren't a big giveaway.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Most of the game's praise is due to the plot, setting and characters, as the gameplay is considered easy and repetitive.
• Fandom Rivalry: While both games have pretty small Fandoms to begin with, it garnered a pretty quick one with Zanki Zero due to issues regarding Bowdlerise. (The former got fixed on release though.)
• Fridge Brilliance: In real-life, the philosopher Socrates (Sen's Guardian) was the teacher of Plato (Anamnesis Revenant form), who created the theory of anamnesis (knowledge as recollection). Suddenly, the connection between them becomes much more obvious.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Koroko's final art, Barrage. She basically anchors herself and keeps punching until you stop hitting the button or it runs its course. It's strong, you can take minor hits without budging and it can stun-lock anything up to humanoid bosses.
  • Nanana has the Nanana Doodle spell. One long, multi-hitting magic beam that keeps you safely out of range and fires up in a fairly short time. Keep leveling her and you'll get the Nanana Doodle x3, an even bigger and more powerful version that can wipe most Revenants with a single attack.
• Iron Woobie: Rei Hatada had to endure so much suffering despite her young age: twin sister died at birth, parents died in a car accident, only friend died in a bus accident (and Rei learns the hard way she was a False Friend). Then she accidentally killed Mirai, her younger sister and only living relative, and was forced to make a Deal with the Devil to undo this.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The game is very easy, as Rei herself is a Master of All, normal battles can be avoided by using dash, healing items can be set to auto-use, and you usually have other characters to switch to.
• Moral Event Horizon: Mephis and Pheles cross this in the third timeline when they convince the party members to kill each other. They only get worse from there, as it's revealed that they had Thelma killed just to milk some Idea out of Rei.
• Narm Charm: The first Revenant seen in the game is a gorilla with bull horns and a red halo. It tries to intimidate you, but when it screams (with the voice of a little girl): "Let's play! Let's play! Let's play together!", it just becomes funny and creepy. That said, the last storyline reveals that it was Nanana's soul corrupted by Pheles, so its behavior makes sense.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Revenants, vengeful spirits wandering Purgatory and hunting the souls of the dead to resurrect. Some Revenants, like Anamnesis and the Revenant Princess, can become powerful enough to temporary manifest themselves in the world of living to commit murders and devour souls, or they can teleport a bus full of people to the Purgatory and force the passengers into killing each other For the Evulz. And there is nothing one can do to prevent it.
  • The Demon Twins due to their habit of stalking Rei (even outside Purgatory) while giggling, and not doing much to prevent the abovementioned Revenant misbehaviour, despite being their job to do so. Not to mention all the experiments with souls and Kick the Dog moments they've done from behind the scenes.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • According to an interview, Crystar was inspired by Drakengard, another Action RPG series with a Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game fame where you have to beat it multiple times for different endings, and the actual gameplay was inspired by the Ys series, particularly the newer ones where you can switch party members and equip skills.
  • Theme-wise, it can also be seen as one to the cancelled Mistwalker game Cry On, due to heavy emphasis on drama.
• That One Achievement: "Memoirs of the Dead, Complete" requires you to fill out the mentioned section. This requires you to kill all the Specters and bosses at least three times, including all the final bosses. Some bosses also have different incarnations across the multiple playthroughs with each one counting as a separate version that has to be beaten again. Parmenides in particular requires beating her nine times due to appearing three different times.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite being Rei's only friend in school and having a personal grudge against her, Yuri Minamo's role in the story is very small and she doesn't appear in the true ending path, unlike Arashi and Kyosuke.

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