If you know me, you know I’m a relatively big fan of games NIS America bring over to America. There are some exceptions, of course, and I’m more partial towards games developped by NIS itself.

This game caught my interest for a number of reasons:
1. Published by NISA
2. Etna
3. Various Darkstalker characters
4. Interesting-looking gameplay
5. Costumes for all the female characters
6. SCHOOLGIRLS!

Read on and see if the game is actually good like I was expecting, or if it actually deserves the stupidly low 3.5/10 rating from IGN.

Looks and sounds
The game uses 2D sprites. Standard Definition 2D sprites. I wouldn’t mind too much, but I was expecting a bit more from the game graphically. The sprites are okay, but they have a big lack of detail. To make the game look weirder, there’s some enemies that are 3D models. Relatively low-quality 3D models. Mostly for big enemies that take multiple squares. The animations during battle are quite good though, well detailed and cool-looking attacks. The animations otherwise (in the world map and in dungeons) are pretty bad though. Graphically, the game is sub-par PS2 level when it comes to 2D. I don’t mind, but I would’ve loved to see all those characters in high-definition 2D instead of sub-par PS2 level…
Oh, but the bigger sprites used during conversations and in the status screens look fine. Oh, and did I mention that changing a character’s costume won’t affect their battle sprite? That sucks ass, I’d love if I could have an army of schoolgirls pwning the enemies, but I can’t. Blu-Ray discs should have more than enough space for a few thousand extra battle sprites(counting each separate frame of animation, of course) for each female characters, there’s no excuse.

Sound-wise, the game is all over the place. Really. The music ranges from really fun to crappy. The battle music is fine, some character themes are a bit weird, and some music just sucks. The sound design is pathetic. In cutscenes, when characters are walking, the sound of footsteps is always the same, no matter if there’s 2 characters or 10 walking at the same time(the only exception is when there’s 1 character walking), and there’s no synchronisation at all. Other sounds during cutscenes are also badly synchronized. The voice acting is pretty good though… When there is voice acting. Cutscenes range randomly from having voice acting to not having voice acting. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the scene is important or not. An important story scene might not have voices while a totally optional and random Hot Spring scene (involving prinny trying to get a glimpse of all the naked girls) will have voices.
The sound design in the game, in general, is pretty bad. And with Blu-Ray, there’s no excuse not to have voices on every scene.

Story
The game takes place in a world composed of souls, or something like that. Souls are sucked into this world, making the world sustain. Someday, some people(from various different worlds) are sucked into the soul-sucking world without their souls getting absorbed. They learn about what the world is, and decide to release souls who haven’t been absorbed yet, and find a way back to their own world. On the way they find other people who got sucked in this world, and enemies, who ALSO got sucked in this world, who were ordered(by some “unknown” being named The Empyreal One) to kill the good guys. You have the find the truth of the world, and get out of there,

That’s basically it. The interesting part is that there’s multiple endings. You get one ending for clearing very specific conditions and basically finding everything in the game (Truth End), and another ending if you miss certain things(Bad Ending), and another ending if you get the things that prevent the bad ending but miss other things that are required for the good ending. Since the conditions are very specific(like keeping some enemies alive in certain story-battles), there’s tons of things to do to be able to get the truth ending, and if you want it you’ll most likely play through the game multiple times and check online for the conditions.

Overall the story is okay.It’s a bit standard, which is weird considering the potential the story has, and it’s not OVERLY good, but it’s still interesting enough.

But the character interactions are not too great most of the time. The conversations are lame, or borderline embarrassing at times. There’s exceptions, of course, but they’re rare. I was definitely expecting more from this, with so many characters from different games. And all the characters other than York and Miko lost their memories, so some characters who should no each other just vaguely remember their names, making for some awkward conversations sometimes.

The characters come from games like Disgaea (sadly there’s just Etna and Prinnies), Darkstalkers, Ar Tonelico, Mana Khemia 2 (coming relatively soon over here), Spectral Souls series (which I’m not very familiar with, other than the lame PSP SRPG which sucks) and there’s a few original characters (York, Miko, the 3 bad guys, Troy and a few others).

Gameplay
So finally the gameplay. Well, it’s a turn-based RPG with a twist. First things first:

Navigation
There are 2 types of areas you can navigate in. First, the world map. Basically, it’s a big empty map(there’s multiple “layers” of the world, and each layer has different areas you can go to). Yes, empty. There’s a few things you can do here. Moving around, which raises the “encounter” meter and battles start when it’s red long enough. There’s Sealed Stone Tablets that prevent you from moving on until you pass certain conditions. Pressing Square makes you search. Searching can find 3 things: Events, souls and save points. Events are where the story advances, or random non-sensical things happen, for some extra comedy/randomness. Souls go towards an invisible variable that determines which costumes get unlocked, go towards the “release ratio” for certain Sealed Stone Tablets, and they give items. Those are needed for various things as well. Save Points, contrarily to what the name says, are not used to save your game(you can actually save anywhere, other than in dungeons). This is where you can shop, do alchemy, check the database for titles and costumes, use a wider area search function and revive unconscious allies.

Searching is a HUGE factor in the game, as you’ll be doing it a lot. Some events you’ll find increase your Search Level, enabling you to find things you couldn’t before. And you know what that means? It means you have to go through all the previous maps to find new souls and events. That is until the final Sealed Stone Tablet tells you there’s only 1 soul left for the release ration in that area of the world, then you can at least skip that one map until you get Search Level 10. This does get a bit tedious, but it can enable you to get in more fights, find more item, and unlock costumes, which is a good thing.

The other type of area is dungeons. They’re handled in a side-scrolling matter. You can jump and double-jump… and that’s about it. You get battles in dungeons the same way you get them on the world map, though it does offer some different enemies. Each dungeon has a bunch of rooms, and exploring them fully is needed to find new items. Just get to the end and that’s it. There’s no challenge really, since there’s no actual obstacles in the platforming.

Battle
Battles are really interesting here. There are 2 sides: the enemy side and the guys you control. Each side is comprised of a 3 by 4 grid, with 1 character per square. Your team is made up of 4 characters from your fairly large roster of characters. Each turn is made up of 2 phases: the Enemy Phase and the Player Phase. In the enemy phase, you opponents attack, and there’s nothing you can do. The player phase is the fun part.

You can choose which character will be attacking with L1 and R1. You choose the target with the D-pad. Each character can have up to 4 attacks assigned to the different face buttons. You set the attacks in the equipment menu, where you have a number of slots for attacks. Each attack has a range, so the placement of your characters on the grid is important. Each attack takes up AP. AP is a set stat on the character, which can be boosted with active skills and certain equipments.  The starting AP is the character’s base AP stat. Their maximum AP is twice their base, and each turn they recover the same number of AP as their base amount. Each attack also has an area of effect. While multiple attacks just hit one target, some attacks target part of  line, some target a whole line, whether it be vertical or horizontal and some attacks hit a set area.

So when you launch an attack, the attack hits, and then you have a timer. During that timer, you can change characters and launch more attacks. These add up to a combo hit count(and each attack has a number of hits it can do). When you hit an enemy, of course his HP comes down but there’s 3 other meters that you can affect: Burst, Break and Down. Different attacks and combos affect different meters. The Break meter basically increases the number of hits(and slightly different animations) that will come from a Branch Combo attack (more about that later), and when it’s down each character attacking at the moment or in a branch combo get a nice AP boost. The Burst and Down bars break the guard of the opponent, increasing the number of damage your attacks do(and from what I understand a given enemy type will only be guard broken from one of those 2 bars). As for the HP, after it gets to 0, the enemy stays alive until you let the timer go down (or if you press left on the left analog stick to end the combo), so you can continue attacking it, and there’s still more HP to remove. Hitting the enemy enough will Overkill it. Overkilling basically gives more chances for item drops and sometimes some rare item drops too.

Branch combos are what you’ll be using to bring that combo hit meter up. Basically, during an attack, if specific attacks follow each other, you’ll get a Branch Combo attack going on. Those usually have special animations, and can involve multiple characters. Some branch combos can be done with only 1 character as well.

EX attacks, which you can access by pressing R2, require not only large amounts of AP, but also the EX bar. The EX bar raises when you get hit, and when you hit. When it’s high enough you can unleash the highly damaging (or healing) EX skills. You get more of those as you level up as well.

When enemies die or you stop your attack, you can end your turn, use items, move your characters around the grid and switch your characters with characters that are out of the battle. All of those (other than ending your turn), use a set amount of AP as well. A valid strategy is to skip your first turn to get tons of AP on your second turn to deliver tons of damage.

Overall, the battle system is very fun to use. It has a little of a learning curve, but by the time you reach the second save point it should be no trouble to use at all. Trying to set up your team to do optimal damage and number of  hits is really fun(number of damage and hits are needed to open up certain titles, which equals more items, money and points). The only annoying thing is that running away ALWAYS works.

Leveling and other powering up methods(and other stuff)
Winning a battle gives you 5 things. Experience points, gold, TP, EP and Party Points. Experience adds up to each character, and when they reach a certain number they level up.  Characters that were not in the active party get less experience points than those that are, so they still level up, but at a slower rate than active party members. Gold is used for 2 things: Synthesis and buying stuff. TP is used in the Save Points to search a large surrounding area, and you can exchange them for items at the database. EP is used for item upgrades, and party points are just like Use Points (which I’ll explain later) but that the whole party can use.

In the Save Point, there’s tons of stuff to do. The Alchemy shop is probably the most important, since you can synthesize, upgrade and enhance items. Each item starts at level 1. If you have the right amount of EP, you can distribute it to the item to raise its level, up to a maximum of 5. Items, after upgrade, can be processed to become different items. Those items are usually materials or active skills(which I’ll explain later).  Synthesis is fairly simple. Find recipes, either in souls, dungeons, or in the 2 shops in the Save Point. Those recipes are then added to the Synthesis menu, and if you have the right materials(which are listed when you highlight the item) you can make them. When you make an item, other than a few exceptions, the item is added to the shop. Also, synthesis will fail, producing a different item than expected. Sometimes it can be good, sometimes it can be bad, it’s random. Finally, each item has a “grade” stat. In the alchemy shop, you can take enemy drops and embed them within your weapons. Each item has a different stat boost, and each item has a different grade requirement. You can put as many things as you want in the items, as long as you have Grade left.

The other thing you can do to power up in the Save Point is use the database, where you can get titles and costumes. Titles have a set of requirements, and give money, PP, TP and items. The requirements range from doing high hit combos, high damage, killing a number of enemies, killing a specific number of specific enemies, finding certain items, finding souls, doing synthesis, and various other stuff, which can be pretty fun to do. Costumes are the interesting part. By getting side-events that have to do with certain characters, you unlock costumes for them in the database. When they’re unlocked, you can see the required conditions to actually get them, and when you get them, you can equip them. For the male characters, it’s really just a stat change. For female characters, it not only changes stats, but also the appearance in the status menus and conversation sprites. The stat changes can be either positive or negative, or sometimes both. Costumes are basically classes. And sometimes they’re just there for the LAWLZ, like Etna’s school swimsuit uniform, which reduced her HP to 1 when I first equipped it (though now she’s a bit higher). The costumes are really a fun element… now if only the battle sprites changed, and the costume change animation was not as lame and cheesy…

As you level up, you get normal stat boosts, but you also get Use Points. Those points are used to add stat points to any stat you want. Each stat has a different requirement of Use Points to be boosted, and that requirement rises as you level the stat up. And different types of characters have different requirements for each stat. For example, mages take less Use Points to boost their intelligence.  In addition to Use Points, you can use Party Points in the same way, by pressing Triangle on the Status option in the menu. This way you can really personalize the stats of every character like you want them. To add another layer to the personalization, there’s active skills. Those can give stat changes, slight behavior changes, or protection to certain types of attacks. Active skills are equipped directly to armor and accessories, which have a different number of slots each.

The leveling offers lots of ways to personalize your characters and really make the kind of team you want. There’s various different ways to boost your equipment and characters, and it’s fun to boost your team and make what works best for you.

OVERALL
Cross Edge has solid gameplay. The battle system is very fun. Sure, it gets a while to get used to, but after about 10 battles you’ll know exactly what to do. There’s a wide range of characters and attacks, so you can build your team like you want. Being limited to only 4 characters in your active party does make for some early decision making, but you can always grind your way to strong characters if you really want to. The leveling methods and various ways to boost your characters and equipment let you with lots of ways to make your characters like you want them.

The navigation is a bit weird and AWFULLY repetitive. Having to go through all the maps again when you search level increases (though some maps are only up to certain levels for that, so after level 5 some maps are okay until you reach level 10), and the world maps are nothing spectacular or incredibly fun. But it still works pretty well.

The gameplay is enough to make up for everything that sucks or are sub-par about this game. It’s fun and addictive, and in the end that’s all that matters.

Why did the game get bad scores?
Because, TECHNICALLY, the game is horrible. Nevermind the low-grade graphics(well, I do like 2D sprites, but most people don’t, so….) and the bad sound design, the whole of the game is a technical mess. Despite the game using low-res 2D sprites and low-res 2D in general, the game can’t run on the PS3 properly without lagging and slowing down constantly. On the world map, you’ll notice framerate drops all the time, especially when you’re using search. During battles sometimes the animation will stop completely for a few frames.  Sometimes the game will just slow down and not register your button presses. This is standard definition 2D game on a POWERHOUSE of a console, and it’s constantly slowing down. The game even slows down in menus. Oh, and while I’m at it, add BAD TRANSLATION to the mix. For the most part the translation seems fine(with a few hiccups here and there), but for some reason they managed to translate “Witch” as “Walorck”. So if you see a title that requires killing 15 warlocks, you actually need to kill 15 witches. Confusing AND stupid.

The other big problem is the loading times. There’s a 4.4GB optional install. You’d expect the loading times for a game like this to take no more than a second for map changes or room changes in dungeons. But the loading times for those can go up to 7-10 seconds long, and that’s WITH the install(can’t imagine how long the loading times are without it). It can’t be that demanding a game for a PS3, so why does it have so much trouble loading things? It’s probably that the code is badly optimized and it has trouble loading it.

Reviewers didn’t look past the technical difficulties, low-grade graphics and amateur-ish sound design. Because of that, it’s obvious that the scores for the game are far from stellar. Oh, and the fact that for some reason the reviewers had trouble with the gameplay as a whole, despite it not being very complicated. That lowered the score too. So basically they didn’t look at the gameplay, they just looked at the technical problems, and deemed the game to be BAD. But it’s not.

Also, I see a lot of people saying the menus are too hard to navigate… I think those people are morons, the menus are incredibly simple and self-explanatory, not much harder to go through than the average Final Fantasy menu.

So yes, the game is screwed up, it had so much potential but is ruined by badly optimized graphics, sounds and coding. The PS3 should logically have no trouble with the game, and there’s so much they could’ve done but didn’t (like costume changing the battle sprites for each character). And that’s why it got low scores. Because of lazy coding and graphics, and really not doing much good technically. Reviewers saw that(and seemingly lots of “normal” gamers), and didn’t look much further than that.

Overall
This is a really fun game. If you can look past the huge number of technical difficulties and bad sound design and low-level graphics, you have a fun and deep RPG with a variety of fun systems and a LOT to do.

NISA fans will find something to love here for sure, RPG gamers should like to see what it’s all about(with a rental at first), but I can’t suggest the game to anyone else really. Modern gamers are too stuck up to give a chance to a game with technical difficulties like this, really.

It deserves a much higher score than what IGN gave, that’s for sure. The gameplay alone is deep and quite interesting, warranting a high score by itself. My guess is that IGN, or any other big name reviewers, didn’t give it a chance and didn’t look further than the technical suckiness.

Yes, it should be on the PS2 (where the technical issues would probably not even be there), but it’s still a respectable game. Considering the lack of RPGs on the PS3, some people might want to at least check it out.

(this is officially my longest review, if not my longest post on the blog… 3600 words is WAY too long >_<)

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, sexy