Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers diverged from the rest of the series perhaps even more markedly than its sibling My Life as a King. Square Enix abandoned the concept of cooperative dungeon crawling with linked Game Boy Advance controllers and instead built a full single-player action-adventure around a young man named Layle, gifted with a rare and dangerous telekinetic power that the other inhabitants of the fantasy world watch with apprehension and tend to avoid.

Layle can lift and move objects and enemies at a distance, and the power and range of this ability further develops as the story progresses, which the game makes extensive use of both in combat and, above all, in solving physics-based puzzles — the player uses telekinesis to hurl boulders, throw enemies off cliffs, or move mechanisms needed to progress further through the story. Control of this ability was designed around gestures with the Wii Remote, so hand motions directly correspond to how Layle lifts, aims at, and releases objects, giving the game an unusually physical, tangible feel of using magic compared to simply pressing buttons on a traditional controller.

A more open world, an emphasis on exploration, and a humorous, lighter tone set Crystal Bearers apart from the more serious tone of the main Final Fantasy series and from the cooperative focus of the previous Crystal Chronicles titles, designed primarily for playing with friends. Side activities such as item collecting, minigames, or battles with giant monsters in the open terrain gave the game an unusually relaxed pace that invited the player to explore the world out of their own curiosity rather than necessity. Not all fans of the series took to this detour, as they expected more of a return to team-based dungeon crawling, but as a standalone experiment it clearly showed just how many different and unexpected directions the Crystal Chronicles brand was able to explore in the Wii era.