Crosses the Edge of incompetent game design

by Kyle Thomson-Diks

Fun factor: Boring

Worth to: Avoid

Not recommended for anyone but existing fans of Cross Edge by virtue of poor gameplay, tedious menus and other crazy flaws.

Cross Edge, brought to us by NIS America is a recent attempt at a crossover fighting game masquerading as an RPG featuring characters from Mana Khemia 2, Altelier Marie, Darkstalkers, Ar Tonelico, Disgaea, Spectral Souls, and a few unique to Cross Edge. And even though you have 18 characters to choose from, Prinny, from Nippon Ichi Software’s “Disgaea” universe, is still the most entertaining and for some reason, unique.

At first glance I was unsure of how to take this game. True to form, NIS America sets the bar at an entirely new low for the PS3 graphics engine with sprite characters with limited and repeated animations and talking character portraits with all of four different faces to cover their entire range of expression.



This is allegedly where the voice acting is supposed to save the day, except that not all events are voiced and all the voices -- except Prinny’s -- are stale and shallow. This isn’t to say that the actors had much to work with in the first place, however, as each of the characters is such a cardboard cutout of a person that any sheet containing their possible personality traits and motivation would consist of two words.

Complete lunacy

Right from the outset the game has you choose the level of difficulty you’d like to play. First red flag; not an RPG. The modes of difficulty are easy, normal, and hard and rate on the scale of 1-10 somewhere in the regions of -3, 5, and 27 respectively. The AI of the game, however, is wholly unpredictable, as at one point I was breezing through every battle only to find myself moments later entrenched in a “surprise boss fight” (more on that in a moment) with two unswitchable characters and in which I had my ass handed to me, scorched cheeks and all.

This brings me to the next point I’d like to make: the storyline. I’m not really sure how to describe it, except as complete lunacy. Most events are nothing more than an extended dialogue between five or six of the characters. Almost no plot progression is made through these events, the characters more concerned with talking about their bust sizes and how better to achieve the level of Morrigan’s back-breaking bosoms. I was actually relieved though when Zelos, the bad boy, shared my sentiment and finally said “You people are exhausting, can we just move on already?”

Story events are found by searching every square inch of the world map with a scanning device to look for souls of the world that you need to release. Essentially this means setting up the map in a grid pattern and taking a few steps, scanning, taking a few steps, scanning again, and so forth. I had literally spent hours doing this at one point before I found the next story event and it occurred to me that I had just spent the past few hours “searching” for the story to an RPG, ostensibly the most story-driven genre of video game out there. And then I added another frowning cloud sticker to my list of game elements.



It should be pointed out that Cross Edge features approximately 80 hours of gameplay and that I’ve so far completely about a quarter of them, the game featuring no in-game clock, nor for that matter, much of any in-game anything, including a tutorial menu for some of the game’s lesser used functions.

Gameplay foes…

The battle system is taken almost precisely from the earlier game, Enchanted Arms, from developer Ubisoft. It features four of your characters positioned strategically on a 3x4 grid opposed to a second grid of the same size on which the enemies are haphazardly placed. Then each side takes turns throwing attacks at one another and possibly making combinations for additional damage. The entire system is fairly intuitive, I must admit, but only after a lot of getting used to.

There are so many attack combinations that it was a little overwhelming, not to mention frustrating, as only certain combinations will have a meaningful effect on a boss. Attacks have a specific range that they can target so I often found myself in the position where an enemy would have 3 HP remaining but no one could target them without moving, an action that requires action points, and then waiting for the next turn for my action points to recover.

Each battle is graded based on how well you do. I only assume as such because for all the game explains it could be based on how many times you got up to go to the bathroom during the battle. Two identical battles, in which every enemy is dispatched on the screen in exactly the same manner, could have a variation in grade from A to D.

And menu woes

All-in-all the battle system rivals only the menu screens in needless complexity. While everything is labeled it becomes more a march of tedious micromanagement than anything else, as the predictable problem of having 18 playable characters begins to take its toll when trying to outfit them all with their appropriate weapons, armor, accessories, costumes (yes, you can put Etna in a swimsuit), movesets, and active abilities, most of which reset to the default “Blank” when you change one aspect of their equipment. This is not to mention the lack of any in-game tutorials or item explanations, not even a little bubble denoting “Recovers 25% HP”. There is a single screen in which you can find out how each item works and woe is you if you forget which item recovers status effects and which recovers HP in battle.



Item creation is featured in Cross Edge as one of the only sources for new weapons and armor. The problem is collecting the necessary materials, as most are either rare drops or only drop from monsters you manage to deal enough damage to; a strange game mechanic that had me running around for random encounters and trying to drag out the battles long enough to store enough points to do the kind of damage necessary. Far be it for items to drop from enemies that I, you know, destroy. Now I have to destroy them twice before I run out of points and time.

Moving on, sound is much less astounding than I had hoped. The entire time I played I heard around 5 different short midi clips on repeat. One battle theme, one cutscene theme, a menu theme, a load-screen theme, and one for the enemy’s lair. Each loops every 30 seconds or so, meaning that even if you like one of the tunes, you’ll probably be sick of hearing it after the hundredth time it plays for you.

Summary

Overall this was a totally frustrating game to try to play, and while I imagine it has its fans, I can’t recommend it to anyone except those fans. Odds are if you like this game then you’ve already played it, and for those that haven’t, don’t bother. Cross Edge is much too long to play as a rental, assuming that you have some semblance of a life, and buying it strikes me as one of the things you might do if you want to get rid of the life you have.