Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates / FFCC: Ring of Fates / FFCC: RoF

Final Fantasy Rebirth » Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates » Review

Nintendo fans rejoiced when Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy would be returning to a Nintendo console, and although it didn’t end up been a main series title that everyone had hoped for; it still ended up defining a new kind of Final Fantasy that Nintendo gamers grew to love. It was inevitable that the Crystal Chronicles subseries would live to see a sequel, or in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates case, a prequel.

When I say a prequel, Ring of Fates doesn’t exactly feel like much of a prequel considering its set a thousand years before the events of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, in a world free of Miasma. However, when you play this game there will be no doubt in your mind that it’s a Crystal Chronicles title with the return of the “chibi” style graphics, hack and slash style game play and the tribes that also appeared in the original Crystal Chronicles. Another thing that’s reminiscent of the original game is the fact that Ring of Fates is a multi-player game, and unfortunately whilst playing the single player game you’ll notice this – mainly due to the artificial intelligence that’s well, not exactly intelligent at all.

One thing that really made Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was the battle system, and I’m pleased to say that Square Enix has decided to stick with this battle system; if not slightly improving it. Ring of Fates has a much more varied battle system due to the fact that you can switch character type at the click of a button, this means that you can always chose between Melee combat, Ranged combat or Magic combat – this works well because it adds a little more strategy to battles, rather than the constant mashing of the attack button that’s usually present in Action RPG’s.

When you’re not fighting, Ring of Fates is essentially moving from one room to the next solving puzzles until you reach the dungeon boss – in Ring of Fates this works particularly well as some of the puzzles are actually quite challenging. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates also had something that’s never usually present in Final Fantasy games, and that’s replay value – after you’ve completed single player mode once, the chances are you’ll want to play it again under the New Game + mode. New Game + basically increases the difficulty of all the enemies, and changes the contents of all the treasure chests meaning that you can get rare weapons that weren’t available in the previous play through.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates Visually Ring of Fates looks pretty good and although the graphics don’t quite match that of those seen in Final Fantasy III and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass their definitely nothing to complain about.

Just like Crystal Chronicles on GameCube, Ring of Fates really shows its true colours when you’re playing multi-player mode with your friends. One of the advantages of playing in multi-player is that you’re actually playing with really people meaning you don’t have to put up with the rather annoying artificial unintelligence. The only thing that really lets Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates down is the fact that you can’t play with you’re friends over Nintendo WiFi, I found this a real shame as this would’ve really made Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates.

Rating: 8/10

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FFCC: Ring of Fates

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