Prerelease:Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

This page details prerelease information and/or media for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes. Notes: This is my first ever contribution for TCRF, so a lot of things might be messed up. Feel free to help out

The final version of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was released in Japan on 8 August 2003, and was the first Square game to be released on a Nintendo console since the release of Final Fantasy VI in 1994. But things were different, like most games before release......

Development

2003

19 March

• • Square announces the Japanese release date of Crystal Chronicles will be 18 June.
  • The game's plot, will supposedly feature a crystal that is slowly starting to lose its power, and it will need a mystical item called Milra's Dew which is needed to restore it.
  • The game focuses on a party (made up of characters named Roy, Linly, Stea, and Voice) that sets out on a journey to find the item.

9 May

• Kawazu states the following in an interview, which is quite contradictory to what the final game is like:
  • As a single-player quest, there will be no other AI characters. You will be playing alone. The final game has Moogle following you, which is indeed a NPC. Perhaps Kawazu was referring to AI party members here?
  • If you were to just play straight through, there'd be about 30 hours of gameplay. But if you were to travel around and collect everything, it'd be quite a bit more than that. The current world record of speedrunning the game without glitches is however 2 hours and 10 minutes, but of course that is not accounting for the knowledge that the speedrunners have.

E3 2003

• Here the game is publicly shown for the first time. A playable demo, with some small changes is shown as well.
  • And to ensure that you all cooperate with each other, the game will feature numerous puzzles requiring each of you to use information available only to you via the GBA screen. This was stated before the convention. This feature does not exist in the final game.
  • The names for the 4 playable characters at this time are "Ciaron, Lu'ge, Cyadd, and Hias".
    • These names would survive into supplementary material and would go on to appear as sample names in Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, albeit with different transliterations: "Kieren" the male Clavat; "Roo Jay" the female Selkie; "Cyadd," the male Lilty, was given a second name and become "Chad Gall"; and "Ilias," the female Yuke. "Ciaran" the Clavat would later serve as the Crystal Chronicles representative in Final Fantasy crossover titles.
  • Players weren't required to use a GBA system in multiplayer.
  • Players had 6 command slots, however, gameplay footage shows that in total players had 7 command slots, indicating that maybe either Attack or Defense was not locked in the slots at first. [1]
  • 3 selectable levels: Tida Village, River Belle Path and Veo Lu Sluice.
  • "The Game Boy normally shows the map, and pressing select will bring up the command slot menu." This indicates that the other menus beside Commandlist and Radar were not included leaving out the rest of the Game Boy interface.
  • There are several differences in the HUD, including names longer than 7 characters, and a slightly different font showing the currently active Command slot. [2]
  • The Lightning effect has a white shine to it, instead of the purple in the final release. [3]
  • Two people are seen clearly getting slowed by an enemy, but they don't have the slow-indicator over their head. [4]
  • Every Stage/Dungeon (Not including towns) are shown in the trailer at the main stage, except for Mount Vellenge, Daemons Court, Goblin Wall and Moschet Manor, suggesting that these may have been developed later. [5]

To do: Document this prototype (if there's a dump of the ROM file)

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: The only footage of this prototype seems to be from the E3 mainstage.

2 June

• The game is delayed until 8 August, which would be the final release date.

2 weeks before release

• Kamiyama gets the idea for moogle painting, and adds it into the game.