“Crystalline World”
Developer: Alakazam
Genre: RPG
Status: Demo
Length: 1 to 2 hours gameplay
Best Feature: The fact that it’s too buggy to play very far
Worst Feature: The fact that the “Best Feature” is LITERALLY the best feature!
Recommended: No

It would be wrong to just call Crystalline World “good”; because “good” tends to connotate “does not suck”, and not sucking is something that Crystalline World does monumentally poorly at.

STORY: 2/20 Starting with a majestically fantastic opening of your character, who apparently is a girl, running through a tunnel from someone with green hair… And believe it or not, I’ve given you a better description of what happens then the game’s intro itself does. For the rest of the game I think there’s an Ultima rip-off hidden under all the “wander around aimlessly until you encounter a disassociated plot scene”, but frankly, I was too busy not giving a damn.

CHARACTERS: 1/15 What the fuck? You mean there was more than one of them? I couldn’t have told you that because, in addition to every character being so painfully the same, the game boasts about a total of TEN CHARACTER SPRITES!

POLITICS: -5/10 They were so wretchedly non-existent that I deemed it fair to deduct points from the Overall score to punish it.

MUSIC AND SOUND: 1/10 A horrid mesh of Squaresoft tracks and Ultima midis. The battle theme was, as tradition dictates, from Final Fantasy, it didn’t get any better from there.

GRAPHICS: 1/8 A painful amount of RTP work was used, and even worse, all of it, both original and not, was put together like a retard running his first game of Dungeons and Dragons. Towns were atrociously constructed and their buildings awkwardly built. As I said, there are only about ten to fifteen sprites used through the entire game, and most of which aren’t RTP are unsightly edits or just plain unsightly.

SYSTEMS: 2/9 Almost none. The only reason that this isn’t a solid “1”, is that if you’re stupid enough to play through half the game, you receive an Objective Database which you can call up to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing. Not a bad idea, unfortunately, there’s NOTHING to do, and when there is, you hardly needed to OD to remind you.

GAMEPLAY: 0/15 Normally it’s not possible to score a “0” in my reviews (Although you’ve already seen the game get a -5, so everything is possible), however, since the game requires the RTP 1.32, it will crash for anyone who doesn’t drag every RTP 1.32 into their appropriate place and run the game again. Use of the RTP 1.32 is considered to be a glitch, so it is graded as so, ESPECIALLY when there is no indication that they are in use. I much would have preferred at the beginning of the game there be some notice saying “This game requires the RTP 1.32”, that way I could have quit right there. Also, the game will crash for non-RTP related reasons in several spots, so all the more reason to judge. Also, much of the games map-based interface was painful bad; most of the events on the first several maps were set to “Press Key” rather than “On Hero Touch”, and accordingly, finding the entrance to some rooms was harder than it should have been. This probably indicates the game was not once tested during construction. Another problem I had was the first boat ride from wherever the hell you started at, to Moonglow, as you had to idly wait in the ship for three minutes with nothing to do but talk to the eight sailors who all say the same thing or rest at the Inn for 10gold a night despite the fact that you haven’t even had a chance to be hurt so far.

(SUB-CATEGORY: DIFFICULTY – 1/5 Insanely bad. Most characters do about 50 to 100 damage. Each monster has easily of 1000 hit points but is completely incapable of doing damage. This means, basically, that stand there like you have down-syndrome, hacking at every single monster (who spawn all too frequently) for excess of 15 to 20 turns. I’m glad the game didn’t have puzzles, as they probably would’ve been as tediously remedial as this.

(SUB-CATEGORY: FUN: 1/5 AAAAAAAAAAAGGHGHGGHGHHGHG!!!!!!

OVERALL: 4/97 (4%): Alakazam's game sucks, his work is not subtly bad like other games, which allow for clever verbal attacks. It just sucks, and because of that, it deserves to be told so out in the open.