CRYSTAR

The game features a somber narrative accompanied by subtle trigger warnings and a repetitive gameplay loop.
Honestly the story itself is what kept me going. Yes, it does require multiple playthroughs to get the entire picture, but it is quite the experience! In the standby screen between stages after a staggering amount of potential emotional damage, you can even pet the MC's dog as emotional support before getting back into it, and as you progress through the story, you will eventually come across other playable characters if our winged main character's combat style doesn't tickle your fancy.

Summary
Dark and interesting story
Incredible soundtrack
Great level and character design
Fun but slightly repetitive combat
Overall
I bought this one on sale with a few other Spike Chunsoft games. Originally, I just wanted to try it out one day and planned on playing it properly at a later point, but it started to strongly, that I didn't want to stop playing and ended up finishing it.
I didn't expect to like Crystar as much as I did. The story and soundtrack are what really surprised me the most, both of which reminded me a lot of the NieR games.
It's rare for me to be impressed by a soundtrack, but I really liked the music in this one a lot. And the English voice acting is surprisingly well done.
Other than that, the game generally has very good designs and is very atmospheric. Even the menu has animations for when you listen to music or level up your weapons.
Gameplay
It's not often that I praise a game for the story and not the gameplay. It's certainly not bad, but it doesn't do anything overly new nor different, which to be fair: it doesn't need to.
The fighting is similar to YS or Devil May Cry, with some skills to unlock and multiple playable characters. You get items and equipment, but it's all fairly simple.
Graphics
Crystar is definitely a gorgeous game. I like that it doesn't look too much like the typical anime-style and has a mature look to it, which is very fitting for the theme. Characters and areas have interesting designs, with a nice mix of dark and pastel colors. Areas unfortunately have some invisible walls around edges, but they're still fun to explore and see.
Story
There are very dark topics in the story, so it might not be for everyone. I personally didn't find it depressing nor upsetting, but I tend to handle that well, so others might see some things as triggers.
There was a point when I got burnt out, since to get to the true ending, you need to finish the game multiple times, although not all the way from the beginning. You can turn the difficulty down though, so that enemies aren't bullet sponges and you can get through areas quicker.
While the plot isn't consistently interesting, I do still highly recommend this game for the overall experience.

This is just about the only game on Steam that made me wish the platform had a "mixed" button for reviews because I can neither recommend this game nor not recommend it.
I think this game fails on the front being enjoyable from a pure gameplay perspective. The combat is very stiff. Mainly due to the fact that there is no way to cancel a move into a dodge, so if you're doing a longer attack(which many of the late game moves are) you're locked into it and are likely to eat hits. Even beyond that, the combat itself is just very uninteresting. And to cap it all off the levels themselves are very samey and repetitive. The closest thing I can compare it to is Tartarus from Persona 3. Very boring samey levels that never do anything to mix it up, with not a single stage gimmick to keep things fresh. At least in Persona you had fun combat and good music to keep you interested so the stages were never much of a problem. I can't give Crystar that benefit. The sad part is that the music IS good, but I could barely hear it most of the time because the audio was very poorly mixed. Even with the music set to max in the setting it always sounded way too quiet. So the second any audio that wasn't the music played it would drown the music out. Even if there was no sfx or voices to drown the music out, the music was just much too low. It got to the point that once I was halfway through the game I noticed that you didn't need to fight enemies to progress the game so I just...kind of stopped fighting enemies entirely outside of the glowing ones that give you equipment and forced story encounters.
And if that's all there was I've just give the game a flat don't recommend, BUT im the kind of person that believes that a game's story and general writing is very important to a game, especially RPGs. I really enjoyed the writing of this game. From the characters to the story itself. I enjoyed most all of it the whole way through, even if the game's final twist was a bit easy to see from a thousand miles away. On top of that I just really enjoy the game's artstyle, from the visuals of the 3D models, to the drawn art of the character stills, and the absolutely gorgeous animated flashback sequences. And like I said earlier, the music is good and it's a shame its so poorly mixed. There IS stuff to enjoy here if you're looking for an interesting narrative. It just depends on how much you're willing to push through the game's mediocre combat to enjoy everything else there is to enjoy.
So once again, I don't really recommend playing the game nor do I recommend avoiding it. Just know that if decide to play the game you don't have fun and polished combat ahead of you, but you do have enjoyable writing, visuals, and music(the little you can hear of it). If that's the sort of thing you're fine with then go ahead, if not then avoid.

Disclaimer, I played through Crystar twice previously on two different platforms. Additionally, some indirect spoilers may come up.
Crystar is a both complicated, and simple game. Very sad, yet very bittersweet. Quite short, but also quite long in some ways. Confronting you with the miseries of being alive, yet also showing the beautiful aspects of life. Injuries from the past will never truly heal, yet you can learn to live with them.
There's no law that enforces kindness in the world. The world is empty. The world is unreasonable. But, however, because of that. You must give meaning to your tears through your will. You must give meaning to the sadness and pain you endure. Because it'll be unrequited. Because it is unfair. Most importantly, use your tears to smile. I'm sure your future will be wonderful. So give meaning to the tears.
That is the message of CRYSTAR.
Its story is definitely its strong suit, though I cant help but wonder why people dislike the gameplay that much. In many ways, it indeed is repetitive and slow. Yet it also compliments its story and message beautifully. A story about the hardships of losing a loved one, even through your own hands doesn't need to be hectic in my opinion. It highlights the dreadfulness of the day to day life even more.
The visuals are also quite noteworthy, for a game this size it is really pretty. Not to mention the quite cool emo/lolita-esque aesthetic.
One thing I want to mention lastly, the budget for this game was distributed really weirdly. The intro may seem a little low effort, but pushing through that is very worth it. If the game had a higher budget, it could have maybe been one of the most successful JRPG's ever. This game is really special to me, so I would highly recommend anyone a fan of sad yet bittersweet stories to give it a try.

A fantastic story with beautiful visuals, some people mention the combat is lacking - and i'd have to agree that it felt a bit repetitive at times, but that didn't do anything to take away from the experience and the characters, the story was immersive and was thoroughly enjoyable
End game is a bit barebones, you have a boss rush and you complete memoirs, which can also be repetitive, again offset by beautiful visuals and environments.
Despite the simple combat, it was a bit of a mindless hack and slash and proved for a relaxing experience while listening to the story unfold.
Pick it up if it's on sale for sure.

Crystar doesn't really feel up to par with classic action RPGs, but it's a playable game despite some severely repetitive content that will eventually numb your mind into boredom. This really should have been a 20-30 hour game for 100% completion, but the devs drag it out to 40-50 hours in the worst possible way by making you fight the same enemies and bosses over and over until your brain pretty much shuts off.

It's an interesting concept, but the story doesn't make much sense. You play as a girl who seemingly enters a nightmare-type alternate dimension with no explanation to save her sister. The idea of crying being a sort of super power is interesting, but the game's mechanics are so shallow that it never really makes you invested in it. After a beautiful anime intro cutscene that is completely disconnected from the rest of the game, you start in a bedroom and have access to a menu that is mostly just used to go into labyrinths and do minor upgrades to your stats.

The combat is mind numbing hack and slash, but you do eventually get four total playable characters so you can switch up your style whenever you want. I played on hard and I started to get very tired around the 15 hour mark because you will fight the same 9 or 10 palette swapped enemies again and again until the movement patterns are burned into your muscle memory. There are these flowers with mouths that are on almost every stage that can instakill you so you want to immediately take them out, then take out the lesser enemies like the ghosts, and then the bigger ones. The thing is that the combat actually is fun, but since every level is the same and the enemies hardly ever change it just feels like the game is out of content by the second chapter.

Fortunately, there are some variations that pop up eventually. Around level 50 you start getting ultra powerful attacks, and there are a ton of unique bosses- about 16 or so. The final boss in particular is a lot of fun because there is skill involved in dodging his attacks and countering at certain times. Certain characters are better against certain bosses. Nanana is like a demon girl character who has a projectile attack that makes her super useful during some fights since she can snipe at a distance. Later on she gets a paint flamethrower type attack that refills constantly and basically melts the bosses. This game is very easy either way because if you run out of health the game will automatically use a large number of healing items and you also have revives. I only died one time the entire game.

Beyond this, the game is mostly story driven and there's not much else to do other than upgrade the abilities, which you can skip completely because the game is so easy. Certain enemies have a purple halo around them and killing them grants "torments" which can translate into skills you can equip. You can upgrade these by adding modifiers purchased at the store or combining two like torments to level them up and make them stronger. It seems complicated in the beginning, but it's actually very simple.

While the story didn't really interest me it got a little better around the end of the game, and it's also really cool that this game has hours of recorded cutscene dialogue. When you actually finish the game the first time, the game will spit you back out at chapter 6 out of 8 to continue on in kind of an alternate story. You do this four times until you actually finally face the final boss. It's an odd structure and I don't fully understand it, and it's particularly annoying because there is this stupid mage fight in the late stages of the game that you will be forced to repeat over and over until your brain turns to mush.

Once you complete the game you can go into endless boss rush mode to gain the experience to reach lvl 99 (This is an achievement) and there is also a bestiary you can fill that is kind of obnoxious since the game doesn't tell you where the enemies you need to find are located. I used a guide and this still took me like eight hours. You also have to beat each enemy and boss three times to collect a new "memoir" (Which is a bit of nonsense prose) to fully fill the journal, which means on top of repeatedly killing the bosses in the boss rush mode I also had to go walk through the entire levels, sit through some of the cutscenes and kill many of the bosses two or three more times to get their memoir and 100% complete the game. It was too much, really, and I would've liked a more lightweight game that focused more on quality content than repetition. With that said this game has a fantastic musical score and tons of boss fights and it's worth playing for that, but keep in mind you will be grinding and grinding the same enemies over and over with little challenge to get to the finish line.

I like this game for its story, characters, and art direction. The main gameplay loop and combat is quite repetitive, but the other aspects of the game make up for it. Once you've had enough, I recommend setting the difficulty to the lowest level, which will make things go significantly faster.