Of course, if you prefer to eschew balance for a squadron of mages or warriors, that's fine too the game lets you set up your team however you'd like. Conveniently enough, there are four different races, so it's nice and easy to set up a balanced team. Your first step is creating as many characters as you would like from scratch and placing these teammates into your four-person party. ![]() In your quest to restore order, Echoes of Time takes all the rest of its cues directly out of the Dungeon-Crawling 101 handbook. The premise and plot development is much thinner than most Square Enix games, but it still does a fair enough job of driving the plot and making sure your actions always have some sort of meaning behind them. Your good deed has unintended consequences, as the local madman finds out about your remote village and access to crystals and proceeds to make all sorts of mayhem. Unfortunately, one of your fellow villagers contracts a mysterious case of "crystal sickness," and you must trot off to the nearest town in order to track down a cure. Set on the dawn of your created character's 16th birthday, you are given a crystal and ushered into adulthood. If you can get past the lackluster presentation and come to grips with the terribly awkward dual-screen setup, you'll find a competent, though not entirely compelling, dungeon-crawler. The game isn't going to win any visual awards, but at least it's passable on the DS on a console, it's an absolute embarrassment. Combined with the fact that the world is all sharp angles and square-based paths, and you begin to wonder if the developers just dug out their Final Fantasy VII kits, minus the impressive (for the mid-'90s) cut scenes. The jagged, polygonal characters would look perfectly at home on the PS1, but in the 21st century, they're just ugly. The main reason the screens were left so tiny and unusable is likely because if they were blown up any bigger, you'd see just how ugly this game is. In order to achieve a playable balance, you are left with either a screen that's too tiny to see much of anything or one that is too tiny to do much of anything. You can resize either screen on the fly, but it's always at the expense of the other, so while one side grows, the other shrinks. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the two screens as presented on your television take up less than half of the entire screen, and interacting with either one is a massive pain. Echoes of Time is presented in a dual-screen style, almost as if it had been developed with a certain handheld system in mind …. If you have a DS, by all means buy Echoes of Time, but this is a Wii review, and console owners are left with a decidedly less impressive game.įirst and foremost, the game's interface is an utter failure on the Wii. ![]() Yes, the title works in the basic sense on a console, but there is almost no fun to be had, and the entire experience is severely underwhelming. Unfortunately, all the things that make the game unique on the DS (or, at the very least, don't detract from the experience) make the Wii version practically unplayable. ![]() Still, the title was clearly designed with the DS as the lead platform, and as a handheld game, it works brilliantly. Enter Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, a title that dreams of rising above its handheld origins to become a console superstar, only to fail and prove once more that transitions such as these rarely work for a reason.Ĭalling the Wii version of Echoes of Time a port is technically incorrect, as the game was developed for simultaneous release across both the Wii and DS. Most times, titles developed with the small screen in mind are deemed too technologically unimpressive to warrant a console remake, but not all developers hold this concept to be an absolute truth. ![]() The thing is, we're used to seeing console games get ported to handhelds, but rarely vice versa. Recently, major titles like BioShock and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 migrated from one console to another, and there are plenty more examples where that came from. Ports have existed for a long time in gaming, with franchises routinely jumping from one system to another with nary a thought about the technical limitations.
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