LOS ANGELES --I spent way more time watching Crystal Bearers at E3 than I did playing it.
Just a few months back, Electronic Gaming Monthly was reporting that the Wii game had been "quietly canceled." This turned out to not be true, with Square Enix showing the game in playable form at its E3 booth. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. Yeah, the name is a serious mouthful. And the game concept's a bit tough to wrap one's head around, too. While the Crystal Chronicles series has traditionally focused on bringing cooperative multiplayer gameplay to the Final Fantasy series, Crystal Bearers is a single-player adventure that strings together a variety of different action-oriented sequences to tell its story -- everything from Wiimote shooting to airship steering.
The game, or at least the E3 demo, also contains copious amounts of non-interactive cinematic sequences. You can't skip any of these scenes because they segue seamlessly into the action. Once you see the main character for the first time, the next thing you know he's jumping off an airplane, dropping through the air, and you're shooting evil birds with a massive green pointer target.
This inaugural shooting sequence didn't feel so hot -- although my character was pictured on screen holding a giant frakkin' machine gun, the unsatisfying sound effects and lack of intense feedback made me feel more like I was firing a peashooter.
Once I was on the airship that I guess the main character was trying to jump to, more cinematics started up, segueing into another disappointing action sequence where I was steering the airship through a narrow canyon, trying not to run into the rock faces. I was not successful, but at least your ship doesn't blow up or anything if you constantly smash into the walls.
Finally, after these two iffy mini-games and lots more movie-watching, I was placed into the main game: I could run around a massive futuristic town filled with people. Crystal Bearers' gimmick is that you can interact physically with people and enemies. If you run into them, you'll push them aside. You can use your crystal to magically lift just about anything into the air and throw it around, regardless of its volume or mass.
Once you highlight something and grab it with the B button, you can flick the Wiimote in any of the four cardinal directions to throw it. Flicking it upwards will cause you to carry it.
Your first major mission is to catch a little girl's runaway ferret. This looked pretty frustrating -- before I played, I watched someone try to do it over and over without success. It's a matter of keeping your cursor on the tiny little rodent long enough for a meter to fill up that indicates you've captured it. If someone bumps into you or the ferret while this is going on, you'll lose the connection.
Once this very brief dalliance with what I assume to be the bulk of the game's interactions is over, it's back into cutscene-and-minigame territory, as the main character and one of his pals take off on a horse-cart, running away from soldiers who want to arrest him for using magic (apparently a big no-no in this particular Final Fantasy world). It worked much like the shooter section: Point and shoot at bridges to knock them down and throw the soldiers off the trail, etc.
So Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is, from what we can observe in the E3 demo, a combination of action game and on-rails shooter. Not a bad idea on paper, but the demo hasn't sold me on the final product. Nintendo says the game will be out in 2009, and I bet it'll attract a few Wii players looking for hard-core entertainment.
