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Featuring jobs and locations from the popular Final Fantasy Tactics series, this unique defensive simulation game requires players to strategically deploy units to fend off encroaching enemy hordes and prevent them from stealing their party’s crystals.

The Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360 version includes several improvements to the interface and a new design optimized for consoles. A worldwide ranking system allows players to upload their scores to leaderboards and see how they stack up against other players around the globe. These and other new features are sure to increase excitement and enhance replayability.

Genre: Strategy

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix

Online Play:

Local Play:

March 11, 2009 –
I’m a sucker for old-school Final Fantasy games. Give me a screen full of Time Mages, Tonberries and Chocobos and come check on me five hours later. Chances are my eyes will be bloodshot and my hands will be contorted into gruesome claws around the controller.

So I should be excited about Crystal Defenders, Square Enix’s first foray onto Xbox Live Arcade. But unfortunately it’s a rough first showing that feels cheap and rushed, with none of the Square polish and attention to detail I’ve come to expect from the Japanese developer. In fact, Crystal Defenders seems to be nothing more than a quick and dirty port of the first version for the original iPod (yes, the one without the fancy touch screen), which is a Final Fantasy take on tower defense.

Tower defense is a real-time strategy genre where you’re given limited resources with which to build defenses on a fixed screen. Enemies will stream from one end of the screen, and you’ll need to make sure you have the right mix of towers (or in this case, class-based Final Fantasy fighters) in order to keep them from reaching the other side. In Crystal Defenders, each time an enemy succeeds in getting through your defenses, you lose a crystal, and if your crystal counter hits zero, you’re a goner.

Dude, there’s my Chocobro!

Defeating enemies nets you gil, which you can spend to buy more fighters and level them up. And if you get desperate, you can spend your precious crystals to summon monsters such as Ifrit and Carbuncle to your aid. The best thing about Crystal Defenders is that it uses character classes from classic FF games like Final Fantasy Tactics. You’ll have access to Thieves, Soldiers, Black Mages, Time Mages, Archers, Dragoons and Tinkers. Each job class has different strengths and weaknesses, and the game does a good job of telling you what characters are best suited to fight certain enemies.

At its core, Crystal Defenders does what it sets out to do: provide a tower defense game in a Final Fantasy skin. But the presentation is halfhearted, the gameplay is stale and the concept is poorly executed. Games like Pixel Junk Monsters on the PlayStation Network have shown that it’s possible to create a tower defense-style game for consoles that looks great, controls well and feels fresh. Square could have taken that approach with Crystal Defenders, but they took the low road instead.

The playfield is not presented in widescreen, the characters are generic looking, the animations are dull and the game is frustrating to control. The cursor is controlled with the left analog stick, and it somehow manages to be sluggish and out of control at the same time. Tapping the stick in a direction moves you one tile at a time, but holding it down results in an oddly accelerated movement that had me constantly overshooting and then overcorrecting. I wanted to like Crystal Defenders, but I wound up shaking my head instead. I’d love to see Square continue to branch out into new genres and new delivery venues, but not like this.

Closing Comments
As both the first Square Enix game and the first tower defense game on Xbox Live Arcade, Crystal Defenders is a disappointment. Yes, it succeeds in providing a tower defense experience with Final Fantasy job classes, but what