BODY: A tear-soaked action RPG about grief is now cheaper than a canned coffee. FuRyu announced on October 18, 2026 that the Nintendo Switch version of CRYSTAR has dropped to ¥288 — a 95% discount and the lowest price the game has ever carried — as part of an eighth-anniversary sale paired with a giveaway campaign.
The deluxe bundle is barely more painful: the edition packaged with the digital art book is going for ¥500. At that spread, the art book effectively costs ¥212, which is the kind of math that tends to move Japanese eShop charts for a weekend.
Crystar first launched on October 18, 2018, built by developer Gemdrops for FuRyu, and it remains one of the publisher's more distinctive swings. You play Rei Hatada, dragged into Purgatory alongside her sister, cutting through the dead while her tears literally fuel her power — weep enough and crystallized sorrow becomes equipment. It's a combat loop wrapped around a story about mourning, and it earned a small but genuinely devoted following, helped along by a soundtrack that punches well above the game's budget tier. NIS America handled the Western release in 2019, so English-speaking players know it too.
The anniversary push also bundles a present campaign, the standard FuRyu move of attaching a social-media giveaway to a storefront discount to buy a second news cycle out of the same promotion.
The insider take
FuRyu's pricing behavior is one of the open secrets of the Japanese eShop. The publisher floods the mid-tier JRPG space — Crystar, The Caligula Effect, Monark, Reynatis — and then discounts aggressively and early, with titles routinely hitting 80–95% off within a few years while Western storefronts hold firmer. Japanese fans have learned to simply wait; "FuRyu sale" is close to a genre-shopping strategy here. One catch for overseas readers: this is a Japanese eShop price, so you need a Japanese Nintendo Account to grab it, and the Japanese build's language options are not guaranteed to include English.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).