{"id":19132,"date":"2019-06-19T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2019-06-19T00:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=19132"},"modified":"2019-06-16T18:32:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-16T18:32:26","slug":"crystal-crisis-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/19\/crystal-crisis-switch\/","title":{"rendered":"Crystal Crisis (Switch)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>About a year ago, I wrote about a fighting game called Blade Stranger<\/strong><\/a>s, which featured characters from various indie games like Cave Story, Code of Princess, The Binding of Isaac, and more.\u00a0 And now many of these characters, plus some new ones, are starring in a new puzzle game for Nintendo Switch.\u00a0 Two cool things about this game:\u00a0 One, it plays just like Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, which is one of my top favorite puzzle games ever.\u00a0 And two, one of the new characters you can play as is FREAKING ASTRO BOY!!!<\/p>\n

So yeah, the game plays almost EXACTLY like Puzzle Fighter.\u00a0 It\u2019s a competitive style puzzler, so you\u2019ll always be playing against someone else, be it the CPU or another human player.\u00a0 Colored blocks fall from the top of the screen into a well, and you must try to place the same colors together.\u00a0 Match the same colored crystal to blocks and they\u2019ll disappear.\u00a0 You can do things like make squares with the blocks to boost your score.\u00a0 When you make big matches or do chain reactions, you\u2019ll send blocks to your opponent\u2019s screen that they can\u2019t use until numbers count down on those blocks.\u00a0 Whoever can make their opponent\u2019s screen fill with blocks first, wins the game.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve added a few new things to this game, though.\u00a0 One, you can make blocks wrap around your well.\u00a0 So you can have one block on one side and another on the other.\u00a0 Also, when you match blocks, a meter will fill up.\u00a0 When it is full, you can press a button to do either a defensive or offensive attack.\u00a0 Some characters even have three meters you can stack.\u00a0 Each characters\u2019 powers are different, and it\u2019s up to you to figure out which ones work best for you.\u00a0 For instance, Astro Boy has one cool move called Reprogram which makes the other players blocks shift a few lines to the right.\u00a0 My favorite thing to do was activate this power so the tallest line of blocks would appear just before the next block would fall, causing the other player\u2019s well to fill up and I would win!\u00a0 Very satisfying.\u00a0 You can also turn off both these new features if you want a more purist game experience.\u00a0 Capcom, if you\u2019re listening, THIS is how you improve Puzzle Fighter.\u00a0 Not by ruining the mobile game<\/strong><\/a>, which I don\u2019t even think you can download anymore.<\/p>\n

There are several different modes of play.\u00a0 For single players, you have an arcade mode where you battle through five or so opponents in different ways.\u00a0 Story Mode has you playing as different characters each round, and there are branching pathways.\u00a0 Play against a friend locally or if you have a Nintendo Online account, you can play online as well.\u00a0 Training explains how to play, and you can view artwork and more in Extras.\u00a0 Options is where you toggle game features and such.\u00a0 Really the only problem I had with the game is that, probably because of the new powers, the game flow seems a bit slower than in Puzzle Fighter.\u00a0 But if you love a good puzzler and are tired of waiting on Capcom to make a new GOOD Puzzle Fighter, Crystal Crisis is the way to go.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m about to go a little fanboy here in this last paragraph because I think it\u2019s really cool that Astro Boy is in this game, as he is one of my favorite anime characters (yeah I\u2019m old school).\u00a0 Astro Boy was created by Osamu Tezuka, who is considered to be the father of Japanese comics called manga. \u00a0Astro Boy has been around since the 1950\u2019s, and there was a new anime reboot they did in the early 2000\u2019s that was really good, too.\u00a0 There is also an Astro Boy game on the Game Boy Advance that is awesome and one of the few Treasure games I really like.\u00a0 Another Tezuka character, Blackjack, is also in Crystal Crisis, but I don\u2019t like that one as much.\u00a0 In unrelated news, Johnny Turbo is also in Crystal Crisis.\u00a0 I only know that name from another game I reviewed a while back<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 What do I have to do to get into a puzzle game like that?\u00a0 And finally, I\u2019m pretty sure Peter Cullen is the narrator for Crystal Crisis, using his Optimus Prime voice.\u00a0 Either that or they got a darn good imitator.\u00a0 One more thing, if you get the physical version of this game, it comes with a great full color instruction booklet.\u00a0 I always like that.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crystal Crisis is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, and Suggestive Themes.\u00a0 Characters zap and smack each other with silly cartoony attacks.\u00a0 All the characters are presented in a short, squat chibi form, so I don\u2019t know how the underdressed female characters could be considered suggestive, but there you are.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t notice any mild language in the text, so it must be used sparingly.\u00a0 Otherwise I think it\u2019s a great puzzle game the whole family can enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year ago, I wrote about a fighting game called Blade Strangers, which featured characters from various indie games like Cave Story, Code of Princess, The Binding of Isaac, and more.\u00a0 And now many of these characters, plus some new ones, are starring in a new puzzle game for Nintendo Switch.\u00a0 Two cool things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews","category-movie-reviews","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19134,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19132\/revisions\/19134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}