Crystal Defenders is the new addition to the Final Fantasy universe. It takes place in Ivalice (The same world as FFT, and FF12.) which is irrelevant because it doesn’t establish, build, or tell any sort of story at all.

I know some of you robots are immediately turned off when someone mentions “Final Fantasy” but this is an exception to the rule. It is what’s known as a tower defense game. Which is basically a very simple strategy game in which you place units at strategic points of a maze so that when the enemies run by you can route them. You can level up your troops, and there are seven different types to choose from. Another cool feature is that when you defeat certain monsters, you can summon them to help you later. The problem with the summon ability is that if you use it in a stage, it automatically takes away your perfect score.

There are 12 stages, and a special secret stage that you can unlock when you get perfect scores on all the stages. The R1 means that this is the beginner difficulty, they are going to release R2 later and I hope that it is a little bit tougher to beat. This one was actually quite easy, but really fun. It’s something that you can just shut your brain off and play through. The only problem is that once you know how to win a stage it’s really easy to repeat your success, and since there is no variation in the game play, I would say this has very little replay ability.

On the plus side it’s only 800 Wii points ($8) so it’s not like you are sinking a lot of money on it. It offers at least a few days of playability, so I think it’s totally worth it. I hope they expand the online features when they release R2 because this would be a really fun game to play two player. Right now the online features consist of score comparisons.

Apparently they are releaseing some other games similar to this on some of the other systems. So if you don’t have a Wii you aren’t completely out of luck. I think this is a fun game and if you have a day to kill, there are far worse uses of your time. The game runs really smooth and the artwork for the game is really cool. It was released April 20th