Can you Stop Encounters in Cris Tales?

As anyone who’s ever played one of the older Final Fantasy games will tell you, the enemy encounter in older JRPGs was absolutely insane. It was a pretty common joke in the 90s and 2000s that you couldn’t go ten steps without bumbling into a fight in those kinds of games, which unfortunately turned a lot of people off to the genre. Cris Tales is a game that’s heavily inspired by those sorts of games, for better or worse, and that includes a mildly ridiculous encounter rate. So, can you stop encounters in Cris Tales?

Can you Stop Encounters in Cris Tales?

For a large portion of the game, the answer is no. Through all of Narim, St. Clarity, and Neva Tulira, if you need to backtrack through dungeons or otherwise return to them to complete sidequests, you’re just going to have to deal with whatever enemies get thrown at you. You can flee from fights (usually), but depending on the version of the game you’re playing, the load times between encounters and exploration can make just starting encounters a frustrating time sink.

However, when you reach the fourth kingdom, Cinder, you’ll finally be able to obtain a means to stop encounters when you don’t feel like dealing with them, though despite what you may assume, it’s not from a sidequest. The means in question is a piece of equipment, the Distortion Ring, and it’s readily available in Elizabeth’s shop right at the entrance of the city. The only catch is that you need 18,000 Marbles to buy it, so hopefully you’ve either been saving up or have some unneeded gear available to hock. 

To use the Distortion Ring, all you gotta do is equip it in the ring equipment slot on one of your active party members. With the ring equipped, you should see a little silver shield icon in the top right of the screen indicating that encounters are disabled. You can leave it on for as long as you want, though remember that missed encounters does mean missed EXP, so try to save it for when you need to leave a dungeon in a hurry or don’t want to be bothered while solving an environmental puzzle.