Cross Edge
In a world where dreams and nightmares become reality, a band of powerful warriors from across dimensions must come together to stop their worlds from being consumed by evil incarnate. Harness the power of characters from such series as Disgaea, Artonelico, and DarkStalkers! Utilize the dynamic battle system to unleash powerful special skills and team combos, and choose your destiny!
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars give it a few hours
first off, if you are looking for a game with amazing next-gen graphics, this is not one of those. most people who are going to be interested in this product probably already know this from playing disgaea 3. but honestly this game could probably have run on a ps1.
like i said in my title, and like other reviewers might have mentioned: play this game for at least 3 hours before giving up on it. i will be honest, i wasnt really into it at all for the first 2 hours, but am now very glad i ventured on because i am pretty hooked.
what is at first really confusing is the battle system, its fairly complex and different enough from what one is used to to be confusing.
however, once you do get the hang of it, it is rather fun.
the first while, the game seems a bit barren and pointless, but that feeling fades soon.
but the dialogue is entertaining, the voice acting (japanese) is great, and once you get the feeling for the game it becomes really fun and addictive.
over all i give this game a 4/5.
its definitely worth it playing.
also: prinny rules, dood.
4 Stars Super fun but with a few flaws
Cross Edge has a few flaws but it’s still super fun. The battle system isn’t hard but takes a little bit of getting used to. It’s unique but not one of the best. The storyline is simple but I tend to like them like that. The graphics are lacking but not horrible. Having characters from other series really saves this game, it wouldn’t be near as fun with only original characters due to some lack of character development. I personally picked up the game because of Morrigan and Lilith (I love them) and definitely don’t regret it.
4 Stars Play it for more than three hours
Please do not listen to anybody who plays a game for 3 hours then writes a review about it.
The depth in this game is amazing! I have been yearning for a good classic style RPG on the PS3 for a long time now and this satisfies my every need.
As far as the “clunky” menu, I have no idea what the above reviewer is doing who supposedly is some kind of expert playing RPG’s (pshhh). The menus are SIMPLE and pretty straight-forward after 10 minutes of gameplay.
You CANNOT play a game of this depth for THREE hours and then review it. There’s 100’s of hours of gameplay, tons of weapons and armor, hidden items, hidden characters, and you’re going to write a review after THREE FREAKING HOURS?
I did not give this game 5 stars because it does not make use of the PS3’s next-gen system in terms of graphics and audio. However, this game absolutely proves that a solid gameplay system, incredible depth and wonderful characters make a game, not the visuals.
Give this game a chance, do not base your review on one simple-minded baby who gave up and said “whaaah, I’mma bash this game on Amazon because I’m not a God in this game three hours into it”
3 Stars Hmm…where do I begin?
OK.
I have a confession to make. The fanservice of this game is what drew me to it. I mean, what real RPG’er wouldn’t want a game that mixes the best characters of so many notable games into one great RPG? The chance to see Morrigan from Darkstalkers engage in battle alongside Aurica from Ar Tonelico? To be able to hear the memorable characters from the Disgaea series d00d!
Unfortunately, fanservice is all the game is. For you, that might be all you need. For me, I was left wanting.
Some background. Cross Edge feels more like a Disgaea offshoot than anything else. Where it does mix the worlds of Disgea, Ar Tonelico, Darkstalkers, Spectral Souls (an older strategy RPG), Mana Khemia 2 (which we in the US have not received yet) and Atelier Marie (the first in the Atelier series which we in the US never have received). It was released first in Japan of course, and the US received it in the latter part of May with very little advertisement or fanfare. In fact I only found out about the game by way of a general search for RPGs. Truthfully, the PS3 is hurting for good JRPGs, and Cross Edge isn’t going to satisfy your hunger if Disgaea didn’t.
Let me explain that. Disgaea 3 is a PS2 game on a Blu-ray disc. Period. There was no reason for that game to be a PS3 game instead of a PS2 game. The graphics aren’t that great, there aren’t any anime cutscenes in the game, everything’s voiced but then PS2 can handle that, and while the game is somewhat lengthy and whatnot, it is a testament to the fact that it had no business on a Blu-ray disc. Cross Edge is another such game with such an identity crisis. It doesn’t act like a next gen game, yet is on next-gen media inexplicably.
The game starts out with York and Miko in a forest. There is no background given, no introduction really, just thrown into the thick of it. You run into Morrigan with very little introduction as well, fight some enemies, then get to do some exploring. You then run into Marie, fight some enemies, then get to do some more exploring. You then run into….
If it sounds like a broken record, that’s intentional, because it’s apparent from the onset of the game that there was no real planning to how this game came about. They figured they would bank on the fanservice of all of the characters involved and not really put effort into the game itself. I might be able to forgive this if there were some anime cutscenes, but alas, like Albert Odyssey and Ar Tonelico before it, the cover is severely misleading and there is no anime to be had. Just still imagery and voiceovers.
Disregarding all of this which is admittedly a turnoff, I decide to stick with it, hoping that it was redeemed in some other way. Sadly, the battle engine isn’t it. Someone was definitely an Enchanted Arms fan here, because the battle engine works almost identical to that engine except for the button mapping of skills. Your four characters and your opponents are on separated grids which are horizontal (which is a problem in of itself as you can’t always see your characters or their orientation. More on that later). The object is to take turns to damage your enemy before your characters run out of AP. Instead of standard turn based fighting, Cross Edge uses a derivative of turn based and action based fighting. You map skills to the face buttons on the controller, each of which has a set AP cost. For each character, you can use the skills as you see fit, up to the expenditure of your AP. You can then swap to another character to use their skills in the same fashion. If you’re lucky (or strong enough), you’ll kill the enemy before they have a chance to counter. This of course is rarely the case as you’ll come across enemies who for some reason can make you miss 99% of your strikes. Frequently you’ll find that no matter what you do, you are unable to land all of your hits clean, or if you do, they take such pathetic damage that it’s as if you missed.
What makes this battle engine truly frustrating is that, instead of some custom mapping for the skills, they are pre-set to certain face buttons. You’ll run into instances where you’ve learned 3-4 skills which can only be used on one button, forcing you to decide instead of being able to map them freely any way you see fit. The game is already linear to a fault; did they really have to force you even further to stick to a structured path? You’re already limited on AP, isn’t that enough?
Other irritants are simple: things such as functional descriptions. You know how you might highlight a skill, task, or selection and receive a nice description of what it does? Not here. This might seem like nitpicking, but it becomes a problem in battle. Because of the grid-based board that you fight on, it means certain characters are close range, some are far, some are a certain number of squares forward, etc. The game does not tell you in advance about each person’s fighting restrictions. This leads to you effectively guessing as to who should be where on the board. It also makes it extremely difficult to decide who to take in battle with you as you don’t know which characters are best suited for each situation.
Yet another irritant comes in the form of the controls. You might think that for such a game, the controls are fairly simple, but not here. It’s just too complex to be able to do simple tasks, and the problem comes due to the face button mapping. Most RPGs have accepted that Triangle is the standard for accessing a menu, but not Cross Edge. Here you must press Start. That wouldn’t be a problem, but for the fact that the menu you receive varies depending on the previous action(s) that occurred. For example, if you just did an attack and the counter is still going, you don’t get the full menu. Instead you get two useless (in battle) options that confuse the player. Once the counter is done, you get a full menu, where you can use items…the problem is that even if you meet all of the conditions, you might still not be able to use an item, and the game will not tell you why. I tried to use a Life Fragment, which has an 18 AP requirement. I used Morrigan, who at the time had 24 AP. Would not go. No explanation given. This is a glaring issue, because that type of behavior can get a person killed.
Yet another irritant (yes, there’s more) is the unbalanced difficulty. Now normally I blast a game that has this condition, and I’m not going to do that here, but trust me, if I did it would be well deserved. The game does everything in its power to make sure you are at a distinct disadvantage at all times. There will never come a time that you will truly dominate your enemy. The store will never have weapons or armor strong enough, maxing out the stuff you do have won’t do any good, and even if you get to a new area, the same stuff is available and nothing even remotely strong enough. The end result is crabs that take three times the damage, bees that get to go three times before you get to go once, and spell masters that will easily knock off half of your magic. Meanwhile your measly weapons barely scratch your enemy, and you’ll end up forced to use one of the magic users, such as Aurica or Misha, to do any notable damage. Of course, the enemy will just target and take them out; not difficult, seeing as their HP is always pathetic.
If the game really wanted to stand out, it should have used the best features of each game instead of taking a Disgaea approach to all of the characters. I should be able to use Misha and/or Aurica and/or Shurelia as the singers in the back, with the ability to defend, and build up their songs to do massive damage. I can’t. I should be able to use the attacking style in Ar Tonelico with Lyner’s various skills to destroy my enemy before they can even breathe. I can’t. I should be able to move freely around the battlefield with Morrigan and fire Soul Fireballs at them. I can’t. I should be able to dance around my enemy with Felicia, throwing ridiculous combos. I can’t. Nothing of what makes each of these characters fun is present in the game.
So…do I recommend it? As a rental? Sure. You might like the game, but personally it’s not that great at all. I give it three stars because of the dialogue, which at times is downright hilarious, especially Prinny (even though there are numerous errors), the fanservice, and the various options such as costumes, titles, and synthesis, which extend the types of things you can do in the game
I’m not saying it’s downright terrible. I’m saying that:
(A) This is a PS2 game burned onto Blu-ray. It should have been released as a PS2 game. Why does that matter? For one, my standards wouldn’t be so high.
(B) The difficulty is severely unbalanced. Maybe you like that. If so, this might appeal to you. Me, I’m not keen on paying $50 to get cheated.
(C) This was an absolute rush job. There was no sincere effort to make this a great game. All they wanted to do was release something for fans, whether it was garbage or not.
If you like Disgaea, this game might actually work for you.
2 Stars Great idea, clunky implementation
Let me preface with the fact that I am only about 3 hours into the game. However, I think I have a good handle on the game since I’ve played role-playing games for years on different systems.
I’ll start with the biggest ‘pro’ I can for the game. I was impressed that I could play with English or Japanese voice acting. I am an anime nerd and like watching it in Japanese (with English subtitles), so I was pleased with this option. Also, the story seems like it might be a decent one. However, the game play and story presentation fall way short. Because of the problems, I can’t recommend this game.
First, the story presentation. So far in about 3 hours, probably 2 hours has been ‘cut scenes’. By ‘cut scene’, I mean a static background with 1-3 static anime characters with on screen (and verbal) dialog. The facial expressions to occasionally change, but it’s a static change, not motion. I don’t mind real movie-style cut scenes (I loved Xenosaga 1), but this is like watching old episodes of Speed Racer…with less animation.
Now, to the real beast – the game play. Cross Edge has a huge learning curve to the battle system…and don’t count on the manual helping much, or the in-game tutorials. It took me until the 5th party member joined before I figured out how to get a 4th member into the battle formation. Also, there is so much going on in a battle screen, that it’s hard to see HP except for the character currently being attacked. You can turn on an HP-display (found it by sheer accident, it wasn’t explained), but text only works on one char at a time (small bars can be shown on all chars).
Beyond the doo dads all over the screen, you also have the clunky, annoying controls. Don’t want to wait for your combo timer to expire because you’re done – move a joystick. Time to end your turn – move a joystick and click a button (or just several buttons). Every turn…even if you have no AP left so can’t do anything. Can’t attack something? Check your range, go through another menu driven thing to move your position and confirm 25 times that you want to move…then attack.
Oh, and don’t forget to hit square every 3 steps on the world map or you’ll miss stuff. And remember to memorize the maze of menus.
I won’t go on any more. There are multiple problems with game play and upgrade systems and the ’static’ story. I was really hoping this would be a great game that would keep me entertained for hours. What it ended up being was a game that could have been made 10 years ago (except for the massive amounts of voice acting) and been clunky and annoying even back then.
