In 2009, Five gaming companies banded together to make a game. This game was a love letter to the Japanese Role Playing Game genre, a collection of various elements that make said genre stand out in all of gaming. Item crafting, world map battles, a long story, deep dungeons, hundreds of unique skills, several characters with their own personalities and individual skills, menu driven game play, a mix of two dimensional sprites with three dimensional backgrounds, skills that could combine together to create highly cinematic attacks, the works. The cast was a combination of original characters, and characters from several well regarded game franchises. The game was called Cross Edge, and it failed miserably, selling less than fifty thousand copies. What happened?
Don't shoot me, bro!
In Cross Edge, there are two characters. One is a boy named York, the other a girl named Miko. York and Miko awaken in a strange world devoid of human life, but with signs of civilization. York and Miko decide to explore the world, to see if they can find anyone. They meet two characters, a girl named May, and that very, very well known video game vixen, Morrigan Aensland, from Darkstalkers.
Thank you, Capcom
May explains to York and Miko that the world they find themselves in is one that is a mixture of three different worlds: the world of Magic, the world of Demons, and the world of Humans. The world itself is bound together by several souls, and if they wish to return to their own world, they must free as many souls as possible. York and Miko set out on this quest, with Morrigan helping them because, well, she thinks it's fun. I'm not complaining, Morrigan is awesome. On this quest, they encounter several new characters from several different video game franchises, including, but by no means limited to:
Ayatane, from Ar Tonelico
Meu, from Spectral Souls
and Liliane, from Mana Khemia 2
However, there are those that would rather the world not be destroyed. These people, lead by an invisible force known as the Empyreal One, call themselves the Twelve Knights. Among them is York and Miko's childhood friend, Troy (another original character), Etna (from Disgaea), Jedah Dohma (also from Darkstalkers), and a few others. The Twelve Knights aim to kill York, Miko, and their allies, therefore keeping this unnatural world intact.
The first of the Twelve Knights to fight York and the rest is Etna. She gets her butt kicked, a lot. So because of that, she gets kicked out of the Knights, and then she joins the good guys. That's very in character for her, actually. After that, the story kind of lulls, nearly grinding to a stop for the next three to four hours (or more, depending on how much time you spend raising your character's levels).
Etna, ladies and gentlemen. Everyone has a Lolita complex for her (but don't worry, she's 1473 years old, so she's legal)
Later, York and Miko encounter Troy, who apparently does not remember them. That is because the Empyreal One created this world from the souls of people living in other worlds, and the people who actually exist here, York's group as well as the Twelve Knights, were all yanked from their home worlds, with their memories wiped out in the process. May, however, is different...
Much later (about thirty game hours!) Miko is abducted, betrayed by Ayatane! This is because Miko is the one capable of destroying the Empyreal One, because she has a connection to the mysterious world. Also, May is another version of Miko, and she's the one who releases the souls back to their original worlds.
Since I have no idea what's going on anymore, here's Morrigan again!
After hours, and hours, and HOURS of game play later, the Empyreal One is defeated, the game ends, and Miko is saved. More on that later...
Cross Edge is, as I've established before, a long game. And when I say 'long', I mean you can easily invest forty, fifty hours into the game, minimum, just to finish the story. Once the main story is finished, you get to play the post game content, which is where the REAL challenge of the game resides. With 30 characters to play with, each with their own unique skills, the player is guaranteed hours upon hours of fighting monsters, experimenting with several combinations. And yet, this is a huge flaw as well, because the insane amount of time you spend leveling these characters AND their skills is guaranteed to bore everyone but the most dedicated, hard core RPG lovers. I, for example, spend an entire hour on the first level of the game, leveling nine characters from level 1 to level 5, just so they could stand a chance of fighting the monsters on the second level! And then another two hours were spent leveling up those same 9 characters, plus another three that joined me in the second level, to get them to level 10, so they wouldn't die in every battle on the third level! And then I spent two and a half hours getting those 12 characters, plus 3 that joined me in the interim, to get them to level 18! And so forth, and so on!
Moreover, there's the insane amount of time spent leveling up each skill. Every character equips up to four skills, depending on their weapons, and these skills need to be leveled up in order to...unlock stronger skills...to kill monsters easily... God! I spent a half hour leveling up one of York's skills from level 3 to level four, and I still needed an entire level to go!
Item crafting can be considered tedious. You can make your own weapons, armor, and accessories. To do this, you need materials, obtained from monsters. Battles are random; you never know what you'll fight until the battle has long started. This can be infuriating if you are looking for one particular monster, and keep fighting hundreds of different monsters instead. For example, in the third level, there is this giant griffon, called the Cook (bad name). This monster has a high amount of health (over a thousand, at a time where you'll be doing about two hundred damage total per turn at most). You need an item from it, called Giant Egg, to make certain items. This monster is rare, you'll encounter it once every ten to twenty minutes. And to get the Giant Egg? You need to over kill it, meaning you have to deal twice as much damage as it does health! In this case, 2000 damage, in one turn, lest it dies before you get the egg!
The game is slow, very slow. The story, as I said before, is thin. So thin, in fact, that for a long time, I forgot there was even a story! This is NOT good for a game that belongs to a genre that is defined by having stories! So, what's the deal?
Well, the deal is that the story is little more than an excuse to feature these characters together. The true meat of the game is in the joy of seeing these characters together, interacting together, fighting side by side. For fans of Darkstalkers, it's in seeing their favorite characters actually star in a game, have focus, full voice work, and playability. I would not be surprised if any fans yelled in delight upon seeing Morrigan Aensland actually speak, with a brand new sprite, and a bikini.
But none of that matters, because Cross Edge is, at the end of the day, very, very flawed. The game is a tribute for a very specific kind of JRPG: the kind that demands a lot of level grinding. But not every JRPG is like that. Not every JRPG demands that the player waste ten hours fighting random battles in order to go up five levels. Furthermore, having a cast of characters THIS large is not always a strong selling point. Some of the best RPG's in the market are those that have seven characters, tops. Chrono Trigger has 7 characters. Final Fantasy 7 has eight at end game. Star Ocean 3 has twelve, but only ten are permanent. Thirty characters may give the player a lot of variety, but either the player spends hours upon hours leveling up EACH character, or ignore some characters in favor of others, arguably destroying the purpose of having so many characters to begin with.
A very frustrating element of the game is how obscure a large chunk of its content truly is. To get the good ending of the game, for example, you need to view certain scenes in certain parts of the world, in an exact order. These scenes exist during very specific intervals in the game; they are ridiculously easy to miss, and if you miss so much as ONE, the good ending is out of your reach for good. One mistake, that's all it takes to completely and utterly send literally fifty hours of your life down the drain. This, to me, is the game's biggest flaw. Some characters are impossible to get if you don't do a very specific, almost insane sequence of events. Oh, missed one? Tough luck.
But are these flaws what doomed Cross Edge from the get go? If the game had a better story and less frustrating features, would it have sold better? Well, I have no reason to think it would have. Cross Edge was built for two audiences: fans of these characters, and gamers that actually LIKE level grinding. Because Cross Edge was designed for fans of all these characters, it would be inconceivable to limit the cast to a more manageable 16 characters, for example. Even if you got rid of all the original characters, you'd still have 19 characters to play as, but would you still have much of a story? Probably not, and if you did, you would have an entirely different game anyway.
But then, we need to take a look at the franchises that are represented in the game. We have here Darkstalkers, a series that had not had a new entry for over a decade when Cross Edge was released; Atelier, a ground breaking series that had not seen a release outside of Japan before 2005 specifically because its style was considered 'too weird' (only one town to explore and interact with, for example, where most RPG's have at least twelve); Ar Tonelico, an RPG series that is very 'under the radar' and is virtually unknown in the mainstream market; Mana Khemia, that suffers the same fate as Ar Tonelico; and Spectral Souls. I actually had to look up in Wikipedia what Spectral Souls was, and which system it's on! It's on the Playstation Portable, for the record. And then, of course, Disgaea, which is a series that enjoys a strong, dedicated fanbase, but is often panned by professional critics for actually using outdated graphics.
Cross Edge was a niche game, made for a niche audience in a niche sub genre. The game alienated the audience that has no patience for long games, so there went the casual gamers. The game alienated the audience that did not like Japanese style Role Playing Games. The game then alienated the people who liked JRPG's for their stories, by having a story that's super thin. Cross Edge then proceeded to further alienate the people who forgive a thin story in an RPG if it has fun gameplay, by being slow to build up. Cross Edge just kept alienating audiences until the amount of gamers it could appeal to was so small, that the game would be a guaranteed financial failure. So yeah, Cross Edge was doomed to fail from the get go.
However, the game is not without it's strong points. I love the game, I still play it. And, to be honest, I am glad I got the game, because not only has it given me plenty of hours of fun, but it also introduced me to the Atelier and Ar Tonelico franchises, which I am greatly curious about, and wish to play with. Plus, as a fan of Morrigan and Etna, the fan boy in me was deeply satisfied in seeing these two characters actually interact with each other, fight side by side, and butt heads every once in a while. So, to me, the game was a success, and I am sad to say that there will never be a Cross Edge 2.
A very frustrating element of the game is how obscure a large chunk of its content truly is. To get the good ending of the game, for example, you need to view certain scenes in certain parts of the world, in an exact order. These scenes exist during very specific intervals in the game; they are ridiculously easy to miss, and if you miss so much as ONE, the good ending is out of your reach for good. One mistake, that's all it takes to completely and utterly send literally fifty hours of your life down the drain. This, to me, is the game's biggest flaw. Some characters are impossible to get if you don't do a very specific, almost insane sequence of events. Oh, missed one? Tough luck.
But are these flaws what doomed Cross Edge from the get go? If the game had a better story and less frustrating features, would it have sold better? Well, I have no reason to think it would have. Cross Edge was built for two audiences: fans of these characters, and gamers that actually LIKE level grinding. Because Cross Edge was designed for fans of all these characters, it would be inconceivable to limit the cast to a more manageable 16 characters, for example. Even if you got rid of all the original characters, you'd still have 19 characters to play as, but would you still have much of a story? Probably not, and if you did, you would have an entirely different game anyway.
But then, we need to take a look at the franchises that are represented in the game. We have here Darkstalkers, a series that had not had a new entry for over a decade when Cross Edge was released; Atelier, a ground breaking series that had not seen a release outside of Japan before 2005 specifically because its style was considered 'too weird' (only one town to explore and interact with, for example, where most RPG's have at least twelve); Ar Tonelico, an RPG series that is very 'under the radar' and is virtually unknown in the mainstream market; Mana Khemia, that suffers the same fate as Ar Tonelico; and Spectral Souls. I actually had to look up in Wikipedia what Spectral Souls was, and which system it's on! It's on the Playstation Portable, for the record. And then, of course, Disgaea, which is a series that enjoys a strong, dedicated fanbase, but is often panned by professional critics for actually using outdated graphics.
Cross Edge was a niche game, made for a niche audience in a niche sub genre. The game alienated the audience that has no patience for long games, so there went the casual gamers. The game alienated the audience that did not like Japanese style Role Playing Games. The game then alienated the people who liked JRPG's for their stories, by having a story that's super thin. Cross Edge then proceeded to further alienate the people who forgive a thin story in an RPG if it has fun gameplay, by being slow to build up. Cross Edge just kept alienating audiences until the amount of gamers it could appeal to was so small, that the game would be a guaranteed financial failure. So yeah, Cross Edge was doomed to fail from the get go.
However, the game is not without it's strong points. I love the game, I still play it. And, to be honest, I am glad I got the game, because not only has it given me plenty of hours of fun, but it also introduced me to the Atelier and Ar Tonelico franchises, which I am greatly curious about, and wish to play with. Plus, as a fan of Morrigan and Etna, the fan boy in me was deeply satisfied in seeing these two characters actually interact with each other, fight side by side, and butt heads every once in a while. So, to me, the game was a success, and I am sad to say that there will never be a Cross Edge 2.
And here's Morrigan again, because Praise be to the Gaming Gods, that's why!
No comments:
Post a Comment