CrossCode Review

CrossCode is an Action RPG for PC and Console made by Radical Fish Games and can also be found on Steam. It plays in the style of an old Secret of Mana game, with the 2d-top-down-ish hack and slash gameplay.

The setup for CrossCode is The Shit I Like: you are playing inside an MMO in a single player RPG. The other people you interact with are actual people who talk about their lives, and each cares about something different in the game. Some are there for cool, visceral activities, while others stay in character, and others still happily gush about the game’s lore. I am a sucker for this shit and it caused me to play more .hack GU than I normally would have, given how unfun the game was to play at times.

The soundtrack is good, the sprite art is really good, the characters are likable and can cover a wide variety of players you’d hang with. The student putting off their group project, the parental type, a couple of roommates, one who’s a hot head, and the other the voice of reason (who plays a tank class, natch). A know it all biology studies student, someone who can’t help but make bad jokes… It’s a really nice cast that feels good to get to know.

You play as Lea, a near-silent protagonist who has amnesia. An acquaintance named Sergey is able to communicate with you privately, and hopes to use the game of CrossCode to help you recover your memories.

Combat is fun. You have a pretty diverse set of skills you can learn (special Dash/Guard abilities on top of your expected Ranged and Melee attacks), but it does something neat. Each time you learn a skill it puts you down a mini fork in the skill tree, 3 nodes long, before it reconnects to the other one. This means each skill is mutually exclusive to the other at that choice point… Except once you unlock a node on one path, you can switch to the other path. So if path A gives you a big AOE swing, +10 Attack and +10 Crit, you can switch to the other melee skill that does a big single target combo, gives +10 Defense and +10 Focus, whenever you can access the tree. It’s really nice and allows you to mix and match, especially when you unlock the tier 2 abilities. You could try to stack similar abilities, or you can get weird with them because you like the versatility.

Combat is pretty simple, with melee combos being the same, but you can dash cancel out of the last hit to avoid the cool down/end lag. You can also trigger a skill to cancel the combo to ramp up damage. You aim your ranged attack with the right stick and use RB/R1/R to fire, but your aim has to focus, otherwise you’ll shoot in a wide arc. Once your shot is aligned, it does a bigger shot that can ricochet off walls, which is useful for some enemies, bosses, and puzzles.

The game starts to open up at the completion of your first dungeon, when you unlock a second level up tree.

Now, there are a few gripes I have. The first is that there are a lot of platforming sections required to advance or complete some quests. I had trouble finding the parts of the terrain that let you go up a “level” so you could traverse new areas sometimes, and you have no jump button, so you could only gain elevation by finding terrain that was one block higher than you, or by finding an active boostpad. These pads usually needed to be activated by finding the long way around, and were often more like shortcuts, instead of making you do the long route again. This part was long and frustrating sometimes, especially when I couldn’t figure out where the hell I actually needed to go or how to get up to a very tempting treasure.

The second gripe I have is that some of the puzzle timing is tight or requires some really quick aiming. A lot of the puzzles are actually really clever and you feel great after clearing some of them, but others are just a “thank god I’m done with this” once you clear it. The assistance option to extend how long puzzle elements are active is extremely helpful and I used it for the last puzzle in the game because otherwise it would have required a LOT of really quick and precise actions that I was not capable of making. I tried a dozen times or so but couldn’t keep up, so I slowed things down and made things stay active longer so I didn’t need to be as on top of things.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed the game. Some of the bosses sucked, and I had to turn down the damage received for the final boss (the fucker’s healthbar is MASSIVE), but I really enjoyed my time with it. Watching Lea, your character, learn to communicate with a limited vocabulary and seeing how this causes both them and everyone else difficulty was really well done and there were a few moments that were really touching.

These Single Player RPGs In An MMO type things tend to focus on something that I really like. It makes the other characters feel more humans, because the writing has to accentuate the difference between what the Character wants in this world, what the Player wants from the game, and what’s bothering the player in their lives. How often have you played a game with other people and had people bitch about their day job, or how people in the group project are flaking, or how finals are coming up or anything like that, and then you’re partied up with them, making callouts on enemies and running a dungeon and goofin’ around. It reminded me of what I felt when I played Final Fantasy XI online. It was nice to dip in, and I look forward to grabbing the DLC later to finish everything out.