You know what our audience likes?
Characters - let's put them all in.
Stats - let's put them all over the place.
Crafting - everything is going to be crafted, EVERYTHING.
Menus - our previous games with a few menus were good, so more must be better.
And do you know what our audience hates? Tutorials. No one likes sitting through long drawn out explanations as to what in the world all of the game mechanics actually does, no one has time for that, we just want game play! That is based off of those game mechanics. . . that never get explained. . . and only make sense after you dig through the internet for hours.
The idea behind Cross Edge is a good one. There are three separate franchises that are coming together, with a mix of new, and they're trying to tell a story. The only problem, all three franchisees are in depth RPG power houses, and to mix together their characters into one giant RPG only creates one giant cluster of confusion.
Let's start the list of confusion!
Characters - I'm not that far into the game and I'm writing this review. Normally I wait for a game to be finished before I write a review, but this one is getting to be a tad bit predictable, so it's getting the review now. The character list for Cross Edge is EXPANSIVE. The list of playable, unique, story line characters is huge, and to understand what any of them do takes a long time of trial and error in battles. There's so many people that I feel like I should know, but ultimately I've found myself asking, who are you? What do you do? Why do I care? Who is the healer? I don't know. I don't even know if that's an option. That leads me to the next one -
Skills - Skills are confusing on top of confusing with a side of WTF. Depending on the weapon that you are using you can get different skills. That means that if you upgrade a weapon into something else, you might just loose that one skill that you really liked because your new weapon doesn't even have it. Each skill has a range and area that it works in. That means that if you have your favorite skill that can wreck people in one or two hits, but you're not in range for it, I'm sorry, but you can no longer use it. That means that instead of trying to figure out which people on my team are the most powerful in single hits with limited range, I'm sticking entirely with weak characters that can hit anywhere on the field just because I don't want to have to worry about the whole idea that my skill and me are positioned poorly so I can't do what I want to do.
Crafting - You can only buy the most basic items in the store. The only way you can ever get anything better is by crafting them. The only problem with this is that to get certain items to upgrade other weapons, you first have to level up a weapon or armor up to max level and then destroy the item to hopefully get a crafting item that is used somewhere else. Then you also have to sit around and farm items that drop from enemies. This means that a lot of your time is spent grinding to upgrade and break weapons just to build other weapons, just to break them, to try to build something else. And that entire process is hardly explained to you. There have been times that I've been playing where I stop and do nothing but grind and play around with the messy crafting system because I'm trying to make sure that my characters are strong enough level to make it to the next area. This is not because I just love having to deal with it and it's so great and smooth that I can't put it down, but rather that it takes so much time and is so convoluted that I have no clue what is going on and get tripped up in menus that it takes me that long to get a weapon, armor, and accessory built and leveled up for my four main party members.
Story - By this point int he game, I'm positive that every evil character that I'm currently fighting is going to join my team, because that's how things have been going up to this point. I know that the nameless shadow that currently is hiding from me, is somehow going to be a team mate of mine in a few days of gameplay. Even with knowing this, because of the massive time gaps between key story line episodes where I am forced to grind and play around with the system to make it work how I need it to I don't know what the game is actually about. I am totally confused by the story. I've tried to understand it, and I've tried to even make my own story line up to break even, but I have no clue what's going on with this game.
Menus - The menus in this game are absolutely stop the game stupid hard to fight through. A lot of time that you're trying to do one thing, you instead have to hunt around and make sure that you're in the right area to do the right thing, otherwise you have another list of menus that you're going to have to sort through to make sure that everything is all right.
In general, this game gives you a lot of stuff to work with, but instead of being a polished amount of stuff, it's a lot of poorly created, poorly managed stuff, that does have that possibility to doing amazing things, but frustrating and confusion are the only real things that you're going to find in this game.
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