This game shines. You can feel the love put into every aspect of it, during every line of every scene. It's funny and heartwarming and pensive and heartbreaking and wonderful. I have two big things to say about it but, tldr, this is a love story that is absolutely worth your time if you want to feel the feels.

Excelling Despite (And Even Because Of) Limits: You ever hear stories about developers working on old hardware like the NES, who really push their creativity to make their vision work despite their limitations? This game feels like that. The developers clearly understood the limits of the VN genre, and used them to their advantage. When you're mostly working with static sprites on static backgrounds, even minor things can have a huge impact. Tiny changes in character expression, small animated visual effects added to the background, even just sliding sprites around can all be used to sell the emotion of a scene. That last trick in particular is used to excellent comedic effect. Also, when your genre limits you to only displaying one or two lines of text at a time, you can really make those lines pack a punch. Which brings us to...

Writing - Depth and Subtlety: The writing here, especially the dialogue, is exquisitely crafted. You can see several levels deep into almost everything that anyone says. I heard a character's entire inner monologue from a single word. The writing pulls off the difficult trick of constantly reminding you that every character, not just our point-of-view character, has a rich inner life. We may only get to read one character's thoughts, but the words and actions of the other characters really make you feel like you can hear their thoughts too. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to do that efficiently. I'm failing to even describe it efficiently. So I'll try to keep my take-home message short.

This game is truly something special.

It is difficult for me to explain why this game is one-of-a-kind. It is, on its face, a pretty mediocre action RPG. But it has meaningful things to say about the nature of memory, consciousness, and perseverance, and it carefully deploys everything at its disposal in service to those themes. Character names, attack names, enemy backstories -- even what your basic equipment is and how that equipment is obtained -- these all have layers of meaning.

I can't say that Crystar succeeds in everything it tries to do, but its ambition is grand enough and it succeeds often enough that I believe it is the exact sort of weird, flawed, supremely interesting experience that should be rewarded.

If you're the kind of person that loves to pick apart every piece of a game to analyze how those pieces serve the whole, this is absolutely the game for you. Just be aware that you'll be spending a lot of time running around doing combat that could best be described as...fine.