“Cris Tales was born as a really, really small prototype based on a single weird mechanic,” Dreams Uncorporated founder and CEO Carlos Andrés Rocha Silva tells me. “A lot of people see Cris Tales and think, ‘Oh my god, it’s a JRPG, they’ve always wanted to make a JRPG’ and in a way, yes, but that mechanic was born naked. Cris Tales was born out of the idea of seeing the past, present, and future at the same time on the same screen. You have to look at several places at the same time.”
Having launched earlier this week for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC, Cris Tales is an ambitious homage to classic JRPGs from a small Colombian studio. The game began life as a simple prototype, one that the development team wanted to use to test mechanics that toyed with time travel and different instances of reality. It worked wonders, and thus eventually saw itself grow into a fully-fledged adventure. This idea eventually evolved into Cris Tales, and the rest is history.
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“We loved the idea of making a homage to classic JRPGs,” Rocha Silva says. “I love JRPGs, I’m heavily influenced more from Japan than the West, so I understand those games. With our previous games, there was a lot of trouble communicating with the team because they didn’t understand what the objective was, what we needed to accomplish, and so I had to be involved in every little decision. So now, when building a JRPG, a lot of the team understands them, they know what they’re about, they’ve played them. So having a reference, it’s much easier to work towards.”
Despite labelling itself as JRPG and sticking closely to the conventions and archetypes associated with the genre, the talent behind Cris Tales is keenly aware of its need to try something new, to prove itself in a field of games that far too often rely on old habits. “Cris Tales definitely tries to innovate upon a lot of elements the genre has,” Rocha Silva explains. “It’s all based around the mechanics, but having a reference, a base point, has been crucial for us to be able to communicate better and to market it to [an international audience]. That’s a little bit about how we came to create a JRPG.”
Nostalgia for JRPGs has pushed Dreams Uncorporated to craft a project that not only pulls from some of the genre’s brightest sparks, but also acts as a declaration of the diversity of Colombian culture, and how it deserves to be explored in the medium in a way that goes beyond tired Western stereotypes. “The game not only has a lot of influences from Japan, it’s also a message from us Colombians to the world,” Rocha Silva says. “The way Crisbell dresses, the architecture in the game, the colours we use, it’s all heavily inspired by Colombia, by who we are, the way people dress in some cities, the places. St. Clarity, which is a kingdom in the game, is a mixture of a lot of different coastal cities in Colombia. We really wanted to inspire ourselves with real places and try to put that essence into the game both in the mechanics and the visuals.”
Away from the game’s cultural intentions, Cris Tales remains a passion project, one where the studio was able to unleash its creativity and harken back to an age of JRPGs that has long been left behind. With the genre experiencing a welcome resurgence of sorts in recent years, it has a chance to make a lasting impact. “There’s absolutely way too much passion here, it’s sort of a dream project,” Rocha Silva tells me. “My favourite game of all time is Final Fantasy 6 and oh my god, it’s so fantastic! In the West, the culture has these issues and stereotypes with how stories are supposed to be told, and they’ve been revolutionised recently, but Japan has been doing that for a while.”
In Final Fantasy 6, the good guys lose partway through the narrative, abandoning the traditional structure tales like this usually abide by opting for something far more ambitious. It’s something few games had done before or since, and the team behind Cris Tales seems to adore this aura of unpredictability. “It’s so awesome, and the villain, I mean Sephiroth is obviously the more stylish supervillain and all that, but Kefka is my favourite,” Rocha Silva says. “It’s such an interesting character, it’s like the Joker before the Joker. Oh my god, there’s so many characters and so much personality to all of them. It has such an experimental way of introducing mechanics.”
Rocha Silva cites Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG as other core influences, but also heaps praise upon modern titles like Octopath Traveller and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Cris Tales is evidently a welcome mixture of so many different components, while also trying to ensure it remains a standalone experience all of its own. “The basic philosophy of our game is to learn from the past, act in the present, and change the future,” Rocha Silva explains. “This limits us in some ways, we cannot change the past, the past is there for you to learn from, like in real life. I mean, the game is sort of a philosophical message, that you can learn from the past by learning, investigating, acting in the present, and building the future.”
Now its release is finally here, it was fun to ask Rocha Silva about the game's arrival, and how it was a perfect mixture of nerves and excitement for the team. "We were very anxious and very scared," Silva tells me. "There's a lot of hype, which in a way is great, because a lot of people are really expecting the game. On the other hand, we just hope we're up to par with expectations. A lot of the team is also feeling a little bit nostalgic, it's been quite a few years since we started this project, and we just hope everything we did with so much love can get into the hands of people and it's what they're expecting."
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