Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

A week ago, I finally finished playing Final Fantasy IX, the oldest and possibly greatest game remaining unbeaten from my childhood. Tonight, I finished off another Final Fantasy game acquired long ago, and... blech. I have almost nothing nice to say about Crystal Chronicles, a spin-off from the main series that came out in 2003 when Final Fantasy spin-offs were a novel and usually excellent idea. Actually, fans familiar with the series would have trouble recognizing this flimsy action RPG as a Final Fantasy game at all, save for the existence of some moogles. Everything about it felt generic and underdeveloped. Not broken, and not even lacking polish; just totally bland and uninspired. You carry a bucket around, sapping various elemental trees for their mist-repelling fluids, and along the way you fight off monotonous swarms of enemies with a limited move set that essentially boils down to swinging a sword or charging up a spell or ranged attack. Worst of all, the game includes a multiplayer option that surely would have made the experience a great deal more fun, but only if you and all of your friends have GameBoy Advances (initially priced at $99.99 each) and the cables that link them to GameCube controller ports (around $15 each, I think). I mean, what a dick move. You can play the boring single-player mode just fine with a GameCube controller, but Nintendo, or Square Enix, or whatever other decision-making bodies were responsible for the call at the time decided not to let a second, third, and fourth player join the action without dropping hundreds of dollars first. Such bullshit. Crystal Chronicles was a shitty enough game on its own, but when you factor in this blatant cash grab nonsense, I'd be stressed to think of a more infuriating letdown of a game. I'm glad I loved Final Fantasy IX, because an experience like this one reminds me that usually when I stopped playing a video game after an hour or two, I did so for a reason. On the bright side, I've now beaten two of the five oldest video games in my backlog so far in 2013, and the year isn't even a tenth over yet.