I love Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. And you know what? Despite some weird stuff going on structurally, I also love Final Fantasy Chronicles Remastered. Some of it is sentimental and related to having like-minded friends, but it’s also a cool, weird game in its own right. That said, setting up a multiplayer session for this game wasn’t easy back in the day, and it isn’t much easier now! But hey, at least this new version is true to the spirit of the original.
How to Play Multiplayer in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered
Among other things, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered does an awful job of explaining how its multiplayer works, and that’s being generous. You get a little cute infographic that sort of, vaguely, acknowledges you might need to know how, but it doesn’t actually give you information. Thank goodness for people like me who bang their heads against this stuff for fun, right? Anyway, the first thing you need to do, host or otherwise, is create a new character.
To do that, you need to choose the “set out” option in the menu once you get through the initial cutscene. You’ll make a character then, and be ready to get moving on your adventure. Your friends will need to be on standby at this point, hopefully creating their own characters. Next, you’ll need to connect to your friends inside the game, and the easiest way to do that is with a special one-time code each player can generate. To do this, you’ll all need to go to the “friends” option in the menu. You’ll see a longer ID number in the top right, but you can ignore that. Instead, there’s a button that denotes a one-time code, and clicking that will give you a six-digit number that’s good for a half an hour. You, as the host, will need to send friend requests, or “follow” your friends using their individual codes. Once you do, they can exit and reopen the friend menu to refresh, find you in the “followers” list, and follow back. Don’t bother making your friends follow each other yet.
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At this point, you can choose the “set out together” option. As the host you’ll create a room, and choose a dungeon. As the host, you dictate the available dungeons via your progress. If you’re all just starting you’ll only be able to choose the first level, but you can advance the story in-between runs. Your friends will just have to chill while you watch any cutscenes, so hopefully you’re all chatting on Discord or something. Anyway once you have a room set, you can send invites if you and your friends followed each other successfully.
If your friends receive the invite, they should see a notification on the map, but that doesn’t seem to be consistent. But if they go to the “set out together” menu after you set the room up, they’ll be able to find your room pretty easily. The UI will actually point out any rooms hosted by friends, and shoot them to the top of the list. From there the rest is pretty straightforward – but if someone is running behind, they can join the dungeon even if it’s already started! Also the coolest part is once you win, you can follow anyone you played with. This way your friends can follow each other without going through the code process two or three more times. The uncool part is everything about the next paragraph.
It seems like the way multiplayer works, is the game is tricked into thinking you (as the host) are the GameCube-haver, and your friends are over with their characters on their memory cards. But since you all are probably not occupying the same physical space, the whole being present for story stuff and things like visiting town aren’t replicated. What this also means is that unless you want to run the same dungeon over and over (why is this an option?) you’ll have to create a new room for every new level. Yeesh!
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Leading up to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered’s launch, there was a delay and bad multiplayer news (no local option) related to unnamed technical issues. Just from the laborious process we’ve gone through here, it seems to me the wacky structure of the original game (Game Boy Advances as controllers!) was not friendly to new code trying to modify those requirements. That’s just a guess though, based on all of the above. So, have you been playing this game to relive old memories, or are you trying it for the first time and very confused about everything? Let us know over at the Prima Games Facebook and Twitter channels!
