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IGN Review of Cross Edge
Oh dearest Cross Edge, whatever will we do with you? We all thought that combining familiar faces from famous Japanese game franchises would be a fun idea. We thought your RPG mechanics and fan service-filled costumes would illicit hefty chuckles and heaps of joy. We were all so very wrong.
Cross Edge is a Japanese RPG that gathers characters from across a number of well-known Japanese gaming companies, including Capcom, Gust and Namco Bandai Games. If you're familiar with Disgaea, Darkstalkers or Ar Tonelico, you'll undoubtedly recognize some of the characters that inevitably join your party. The premise of combining the assets of different companies together has always been an intriguing one. Games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Smash Bros. speak volumes about the wild success of such mash-ups, so one would imagine that Cross Edge could feed off of that fanboyish desire to see the gaming greats join together in battle. But unfortunately, Cross Edge comes nowhere near the greatness of its mash-up predecessors. For every cute or impressive element in its structure, Cross Edge sports ten horrible lesions of flawed game design.
What puzzles me about Cross Edge is how a game with so many flaws can add a few welcome refinements to classic JRPG stereotypes. For example, during the lengthy dialogue scenes where static character portraits talk amongst themselves, you can hit Start to automate the scene (which progresses the dialog boxes for you), press Circle to pause them, hit Square to fast-forward or press Triangle for a complete log of the conversation. During battle, you can also skip the attack animations to speed up the game's pacing significantly, which is another surprisingly helpful feature.
I call these minor refinements "surprising" because of how they're so oddly nestled amidst such awful, convoluted gameplay mechanics. First and foremost: Cross Edge has a ridiculous learning curve. There are more gauges, icons, button cues, timers and numbers on the interface than there are stars in the sky.
Every character in your party of four has a pool of AP that dictates how many actions that character can take during your phase (a.k.a. your turn). A character's attack can be mapped to the face buttons and the L1/R1 triggers are used to scroll through your party members. In order to keep up a chain of attacks and activate combo techniques, you have to hit a face button to attack, quickly switch to a new character and then hit another face button to make them attack in turn. This is the shortened explanation, of course, as attempting to document everything on screen would be like outlining the design schematics for a jetfighter.
But describing the muddled battle system doesn't fully demonstrate the awkward design of this RPG. Even simple tasks like menu navigation suffer under a confusing series of button presses and nondescript item entries. For example, there are five separate menus just for dealing with items. If you want to use an item, you go to one menu. But if you want to sort your items, you go to another menu.
This sort of counterintuitive nonsense extends outwards to nearly all facets of Cross Edge's structure. When you're traversing the world map, you have to scan the surrounding environment (by pressing Square) in order to uncover event incidences. But this often amounts to just running back and forth on the map, trying to search for unrelated events that stumble towards forming the game's plot. And it's difficult to enjoy this plot because of the sheer number of characters in your party. Before I even hit the ten hour mark, I already had more than 14 characters that all attempted to talk during ridiculously cluttered dialogue scenes. It just doesn't work. The more people you introduce, the harder it is to get emotionally involved, which is supposed to be a huge part of the RPG experience.
Oh, one last note: there's constant slowdown in this game, too -- a game that only features bland environments and simple 2D sprites. And this is, sadly, after the nearly 4 GB optional install. Awesome.
©2009-05-29, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Cross Edge is a Japanese RPG that gathers characters from across a number of well-known Japanese gaming companies, including Capcom, Gust and Namco Bandai Games. If you're familiar with Disgaea, Darkstalkers or Ar Tonelico, you'll undoubtedly recognize some of the characters that inevitably join your party. The premise of combining the assets of different companies together has always been an intriguing one. Games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Smash Bros. speak volumes about the wild success of such mash-ups, so one would imagine that Cross Edge could feed off of that fanboyish desire to see the gaming greats join together in battle. But unfortunately, Cross Edge comes nowhere near the greatness of its mash-up predecessors. For every cute or impressive element in its structure, Cross Edge sports ten horrible lesions of flawed game design.
What puzzles me about Cross Edge is how a game with so many flaws can add a few welcome refinements to classic JRPG stereotypes. For example, during the lengthy dialogue scenes where static character portraits talk amongst themselves, you can hit Start to automate the scene (which progresses the dialog boxes for you), press Circle to pause them, hit Square to fast-forward or press Triangle for a complete log of the conversation. During battle, you can also skip the attack animations to speed up the game's pacing significantly, which is another surprisingly helpful feature.
I call these minor refinements "surprising" because of how they're so oddly nestled amidst such awful, convoluted gameplay mechanics. First and foremost: Cross Edge has a ridiculous learning curve. There are more gauges, icons, button cues, timers and numbers on the interface than there are stars in the sky.
Every character in your party of four has a pool of AP that dictates how many actions that character can take during your phase (a.k.a. your turn). A character's attack can be mapped to the face buttons and the L1/R1 triggers are used to scroll through your party members. In order to keep up a chain of attacks and activate combo techniques, you have to hit a face button to attack, quickly switch to a new character and then hit another face button to make them attack in turn. This is the shortened explanation, of course, as attempting to document everything on screen would be like outlining the design schematics for a jetfighter.
But describing the muddled battle system doesn't fully demonstrate the awkward design of this RPG. Even simple tasks like menu navigation suffer under a confusing series of button presses and nondescript item entries. For example, there are five separate menus just for dealing with items. If you want to use an item, you go to one menu. But if you want to sort your items, you go to another menu.
This sort of counterintuitive nonsense extends outwards to nearly all facets of Cross Edge's structure. When you're traversing the world map, you have to scan the surrounding environment (by pressing Square) in order to uncover event incidences. But this often amounts to just running back and forth on the map, trying to search for unrelated events that stumble towards forming the game's plot. And it's difficult to enjoy this plot because of the sheer number of characters in your party. Before I even hit the ten hour mark, I already had more than 14 characters that all attempted to talk during ridiculously cluttered dialogue scenes. It just doesn't work. The more people you introduce, the harder it is to get emotionally involved, which is supposed to be a huge part of the RPG experience.
Oh, one last note: there's constant slowdown in this game, too -- a game that only features bland environments and simple 2D sprites. And this is, sadly, after the nearly 4 GB optional install. Awesome.
©2009-05-29, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved