Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (2003) — The Summer We Brought Four GBAs

August 8, 2003 — The Day Final Fantasy Came Back to a Nintendo Console

Hello, this is Toki. Welcome to the 25th installment of "Today Is Release Day." What I dug up today is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, released on August 8, 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube. Developed by Game Designers Studio and published in Japan by Nintendo. Today marks exactly 23 years.

It had been nine years since a Final Fantasy appeared on a Nintendo home console — the last being Final Fantasy VI on the Super Famicom in 1994. And Square and Enix had merged into Square Enix on April 1 of that same year, 2003. That makes this the first original Final Fantasy — not a remake — to reach store shelves after the merger. Line the dates up, and you can see just how much of a turning point that summer was.

From the thumbnail of the commercial archive "[GameCube CM1] Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (2003)" (YouTube)

That the game appeared on Nintendo hardware at all was no small matter at the time. In 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment had fully subscribed to a third-party allotment of Square shares and become its second-largest shareholder, and supplying software to Nintendo was widely seen as difficult. So on March 9, 2002, Square announced the founding of a planning and development company headed by Akitoshi Kawazu: "Game Designers Studio," capitalized at 10 million yen, with ownership split 51% Kawazu and 49% Square. GAME Watch reported at the time that financing from "Fund-Q," the investment fund established by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, was also under discussion. At the far end of that detour lay this day, one year and five months later.

What Kind of Game It Was — Carrying the Crystal Chalice in Turns Through the Miasma

The world is blanketed in a stagnant air called "miasma," in which people cannot survive. To preserve the protection of the crystal that wards it off, each village must gather "drops of myrrh" every year. The player joins the gathering party — the "crystal caravan." You choose from four tribes: Clavat, Lilty, Yuke, and Selkie.

Inside a dungeon, the only safe place is within the barrier cast by the "crystal chalice," set with a shard of crystal. And whoever carries the chalice cannot fight. So the party naturally moves in step, trading off the carrying duty as it advances. The design doesn't "encourage" cooperative play — it demands it as a physical law of its world.

Combat isn't menu-driven but an action RPG: spells and special attacks are aimed with a "target ring" displayed on screen. Overlapping the rings of several players triggers the combined magic called "magic pile." Fire plus Fire becomes Fira, three players together make Firaga, and combined with a special attack you get an enchanted blade. Getting the timing right meant genuinely calling out to each other across the living room.

And here is the defining condition of that four-player mode: you needed as many Game Boy Advance units and link cables as there were players, with each person holding a GBA as a controller. Your own command list appeared on that small personal screen, and each player's radar carried only part of the full functionality. Everyone held different information and had to share it aloud — one television, but four screens in four pairs of hands: a strange and rather lavish arrangement.

The Reaction at the Time — A Grand Prize, and Bewilderment at "Bring Four GBAs"

Sales first. According to the period sales data compiled on the English Wikipedia, the game sold over 179,500 units in its debut week in Japan, reaching second place on the charts. By 2004 it had sold nearly 355,000 units, making it the 28th best-selling game title of the year in Japan. Following its North American release it was the best-selling title of the month, and in the UK it was the best-selling GameCube title of its release week. As of October 2007, it had shipped over 1.3 million copies worldwide. Far from mainline Final Fantasy figures, but a solid showing for a spin-off.

The criticism split. The review table on the English Wikipedia lists a Famitsu Cross Review score of 32/40, Metacritic 80, GameSpot 8/10, and IGN 7.5/10. Eurogamer's Rob Fahey gave it a near-perfect score, calling it "one of the best action RPGs" he had played. Andrew Reiner of Game Informer, by contrast, was merciless, dismissing it as "an experiment gone awry" and "unfit to bear the sacrosanct Final Fantasy name."

The greatest point of contention was, of course, that four-player requirement. GameSpot's Brad Shoemaker enjoyed the game itself while faulting the steep hardware demands needed for the full experience. IGN's Mary Jane Irwin praised its design but noted the high barrier to entry for multiplayer and the thin motivation to replay. The conclusion common to Japanese and English-language coverage alike: an innovative title, but with several flaws keeping it from ranking among the best Final Fantasy games.

Institutional recognition, however, was high. At the 7th Japan Media Arts Festival, covering 2003, the game received the Grand Prize in the Entertainment Division. Game producer Yu Suzuki, who judged the game category, wrote in his commentary that it was "a well-balanced, high-quality game that reaches a high standard on every measure — visuals, music, and interactivity — and is simply enjoyable to handle." The jury selections in that same division that year included Katamari Damacy, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, WarioWare, and Siren — which gives some sense of how dense a year 2003 was.

Today, 23 Years Later

The video below is an archive of the original television commercial: "[GameCube CM1] Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (2003) [GC Commercial Message FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES]." Within those few seconds, the air of a store shelf in the summer of 2003 is still preserved.

The game returned on August 27, 2020 as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, iOS, and Android. It added online multiplayer and cross-platform play, character voices, and two theme songs performed by Yae, "Kazenone" and "Hoshizukiyo."

That remaster, however, removed the GameCube version's offline multiplayer — the way of playing where four people gathered around a single television. And the iOS version ceased distribution on February 13, 2025, after a complete fix for its defects was judged unfeasible. Bringing four Game Boy Advance units together, the most inconvenient and most delightful way to play in 2003, has not been restored anywhere so far.

That, I think, is precisely why the "ready — go!" called out in living rooms that summer now lives more in memory than in the record. When your work is digging through documents, you keep running into this part that was never written down.

In Closing — The Date August 8, 2003

Let me write the year down one more time: August 8, 2003. Four months and one week after Square and Enix merged; the day Final Fantasy returned to a Nintendo home console after nine years; and one year and five months after March 9, 2002, when an entire company had to be founded for that purpose alone. For someone who doesn't feel an article is finished without a row of years in it, this one was unusually pleasant to write.

Do you have a game you played by hauling your equipment over to a friend's house? If you'd like, tell me about it. I'll see you at the next release day.