Topic: Crystal Bearers ain't lookin' so hot

Still, it's not a core Final Fantasy game. If FF XIII (or whatever they are up to) only sold 140,000 then people should worry but 140,000 of a game they just slapped the FF branding onto doesn't mean squat.

Although it does make people wonder why they won't release core games on the Wii. I bet they could do even a remake of core games and get better sales than these "Dead Space Presents:" and "Final Fantasy Brings You" type games. Crystal Bearers isn't a Final Fantasy game so it's sales really shouldn't be used to base what a real Final Fantasy game would do on the Wii.

http://gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=111165 Crystal Bearers could be a new IP for all I care, it's a quality title that deserves high number for being both fun and unique. Also people tend to lean more toward games that focus on motion control. I highly doubt a true Final Fantasy would do much better. There's not a huge audience for traditional games on Wii. Hell, if you wanted tradition, you should have went with the other platforms to begin with. If you wanted gaming that's a bit more unorthodox then Wii is supposed to be your machine.

But see, if it didn't have the Final Fantasy branding on it 140,000 copies in three weeks would be looked at as doing well. I don't mean to sound rude, so if this comes across that way I apologize beforehand, but Crystal Bearers isn't unorthodox. No matter how much of a quality title you and others think it is, most people consider the Crystal Chronicles series to just be generic rpg's. It started out bad on the Gamecube with it's gimmick of GBA conectivity and turned people off from day one. You've heard the saying you never get another chance to maoke a first impression and it's truer in video games than just about anything. With rare exceptions (the Grand Theft Auto series comes to mind) you hardly ever gain a footing when you don't get outrageously high sales on your first game.

With that said, I'm sure it will eventually sell at least 350-500 thousand copies. I don't know why we (and the game companies) are so worried about early sales figures. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Besides, this is early in the year when most stores don't order extra stock of anything for yearly inventory and a lot of people are still playing what they got over the holidays just three weeks ago. Give it a bit more time, if given time the cream always rises to the top.

In the end, it doesn't matter how many copies it sells, it matters how much money Square makes off the game, and if it doesn't make them enough money to justify a sequel or another "core" game, than clearly it didn't sell enough.

We'll never know what "enough" is because we'll never know how much it cost to make and market this game.
All I can hope for is that it does make money and make enough to warrant a sequel, cause I really want a sequel.

Well increase that number by one, my roommate bought a copy. i'm very impressed that the main character is not whiney and it is a very interesting game

Final Fantasy = good. Final Fantasy spinoff = mediocre or just plain crap. Sadly, the Crystal Bearers continues this trend.

For a 3rd party title to do 6-figures in 3 weeks on the Wii is actually pretty good, I'd say. It's definitely a title I'm going to pick up on the back of the positive thread here, but I don't feel the need to get it on release (05 February in the UK), so could be March/April timeframe. There's a lot of stuff coming out in Q1 I'm more interested in.

@rowdy
No you don't sound rude at all. I myself found the vaguely European-but-it's-not-visuals and the whole four race thing rather dull. The GameCube game as well as the DS games have made pretty decent numbers. So your a bit wrong on the whole "people don't buy it because on the 'Final Fantasy brings you' business.

Because this is the first ever FF game to feature minigames in it.

Are you mad?NSWMBW was pretty much the only game on the shelves on most shops.

I have heard it is short so will not be forking out the full price. It looks and sounds like lots of fun, so I'll still be picking it up once the price goes down.

Yeah that's sure to turn a lot of people off. The side games are quite fun though. I wish the story was more fleshed out. Great for if you just want to fool around and not worry about the plot.

ONM reckoned about 20 hours play. I'm unsure of whether that's the main body of the game or not.

20hrs? I don't rush games at all and like to tidy everything up as I play, so that should extend it. If the core mechanic is as cool as it sounds, I will waste many hours just wandering around messing about. Still gotta wait a couple of weeks till release over here, I'm hoping the less than positive response so far will effect the price point and I can pick it up straight away instead of having to wait.

You can generally increase that play through time by up to about 50% depending on your general game-playing skilz.
Most reviewers reckoned on Ico taking 6-8 hours first time through. I took 11.

These people play games for a living remember.

Going back to FFCC though, I might hang on and see how the reviews for rune Frontier pan out before taking the plunge. I rather suspect that it'll come down in price pretty quickly after release too.

Too me 10 hours to clear the game, I guess if you were just plowing through the story it's take you 6-8, but honestly most games are that short.

Hell, without all the side stuff, you could probably clear a Zelda game that fast, and I remember being able to clear Beyond Good and Evil in around 5 hours, not to mention most FPS are about that long as well. God of War too.
That's what the side stuff is for, most games main campaign is shorter than you think.

You should've walked into a game store the week before christmas. There wasn't a single copy in my whole county. I had to order it online.

fast forward to 23:50. If both noobtoobers say this game sucks, it most probably does.

Listen to those guys for five minutes and it's pretty clear their opinion on this game isn't really worth listening to. Honestly, stating that "lack of experience points" means your character's actions are aimless is totally bizarre -- is there not a story for motivation, hello?

And I'm sorry anything that's calling itself "gaming news for gamers" is immediately suspect.

If you'd just watch a whole episode by noobtoob you'd know they're not a joke. It's either thumbs up or thumbs down. They don't have time to play a game through to the end if they don't like it since they're doing that podcast every week reviewing alot of games for different systems.

If both agree a game is really bad then there's merit to what they're saying. Especially since both of them had looked forward to crystal chronicles.