When Cross Edge was first announced by NIS America, there was a lot of buzz and hype surrounding this rpg game. The concept of Cross Edge was base on having an all star cast of characters from different NIS America related games in one game much like the concept behind Kingdom Hearts where you have Final Fantasy and Disney characters all appearing in one game. Whenever there's a game that uses an all star cast of characters from different games, there's going to be a mass broadband appeal toward the game due to different fan base being interested in that game for featuring their favorite characters. For a prime example of this, look at how popular the Kingdom Hearts games has become with the concept of cross game characters appearing together. Cross Edge is NIS America attempt at having its own Kingdom Heart type of game. But will Cross Edge be able to garner the mass appeal and high popularity that a game featuring an all star cast of cross game characters gets? Sadly the answer is no. There are few problems with this game that prevent it from getting that mass appeal from the majority of rpgers out there. So let's go over where this game went wrong in this review.
STORY
"What game are you from, dear?"
"We need to kill these out-worlders!"
York and Miko have awakened in an unknown world with environments that seem to pop from a dream world than the more realistic world of Japan. Immediately they are attack by monsters but luckily a stranger jumped in to help them fend off the monsters. After the fight she introduced herself as Morrigan. Outside of knowing her name, she too doesn't know how she got to this world and where she is from as her memory has been erased. York, Miko, and Morrigan agreed to join together to search this world for clues on how they got here. Soon after, they met a mysterious girl by the name of May. May tells the trio that this world has been gathering souls from different worlds and sealing them in crystals. It's not clear yet as to why this world has been gathering souls from different worlds but that Miko, York, and Morrigan are souls that are brought from other worlds but have escaped from being sealed. There may have been others too have been brought here but have escaped just like them. May tells them that in order for them to go back to the world they came from, they have to help her unleashed these trap souls. Once all the seal souls have been freed, they can return back to their world. The group then set out on their mission and hopefully with luck they can find others in similar situation as them to help them on their mission.
I have to stay that the most disappointing thing about this game is the story. Base on the concept of an all star cast of characters from different games, you think this would be a kick ass rpg story that will be interesting much in the way of Kingdom Hearts. Unfortunately it's totally the opposite of Kingdom Heart. The story for the most part is just boring and lackluster with no general direction or key plot developments. It also lacks emotion. It's like the game developers created an atmosphere on why all these characters are in this game or this world but then don't really know what to do with them. So what do they do with the story after the introduction? They have these guys walk around from one place to the next meeting a new character and then fighting them. After they fight them, the new characters than join your party entourage. Then you repeat the whole process again with the next character. Since there are like 30 characters in this game, the game and story drag this out from the beginning to the end. And this is basically what the story is about. You know there's something wrong with the story when all the villains end up joining your party and you are basically left with no bad guys left in the story. Most of the story scenes were just random chatter that didn't really offer anything meaningful at all other than just throwing out a few swear words and trash talking before the fight. The story just became boring and so uninteresting by midway point, a major disappointment. It took a lot of effort just trying to get to the end of this story.
Score 5/10
CHARACTERS
There's too many of us, guys. :(
Obviously the main attraction of this game is the all star cast of characters from different NIS America games appearing in this one. You are looking at a total of 30 characters for this entire game. This of course means 30 playable characters. On the surface, 30 characters from different rpg games would seem cool but trying to fit 30 characters in an rpg storyline and develop them is pretty much an impossible task. What you end up having here is quantity over quality. Despite the colorfulness of these characters, they seem to come off very flat and boring in this game. In their own game and rpg story where these characters originally came from, they were more interesting. But in Cross Edge, the game doesn't really seem to know what to do with all these characters and how to fit them into the storyline properly so what the game did was have these characters make chatter talk before a fight and during some odd story event scenes. And most of these chatter scenes seem to be nothing more than random talk that is boring and add no real value to the story. None of these characters have a strong involvement in the storyline that would make them remotely interesting at all. And if the characters aren't boring you to death, they are annoying you to death being obnoxious and arrogant with a bad mouth that you wish in never wanting to have kids again. Nobody likes wannabe characters that think they are bad ass and feel the need to curse to make themselves look cool. And in this game there are a few wannabes in here that can turn the older players off. I look at this game from at the off shoot with all these great characters from different games but when I actually get a chance to play the game with these characters, they just end up being so boring and bored the hell out of me. This is the first rpg game in a long time where I feel so disconnected with the characters in the game. Even Etna who is a great character from the Disgaea series fall flat in this game. Too many characters with no real purpose in the game or story at all.
Score: 6/10
GRAPHICS
Beautiful 2D artworks.
The one thing you can say about high definition blu ray is that it can even make the average looking game look pretty decent. This is very true in the case of Cross Edge. The game really doesn't use anything stunning for it's graphics outside of the 2D artwork environments for its dungeons and story scenes with drawn 2D sprites for battle gameplay. It's almost laziness on the designers on how simplistic they made everything look. They pretty much slapped together a bunch of different background artworks with character artworks for story scenes. Rotating a different background artwork in and out for different scenes but overall just re-using them over and over. The background artworks are kind of bland too and aren't visually impressive. However at least the character artworks are drawn very nicely I have to admit. They are very clean and colored beautifully. The dungeon graphic environments have pretty much the same work ethic put into it like the story background artworks. You are pretty much looking at 3 or 4 different dungeon environments that are used over and over in each different dungeon. They are pretty much basic 2D side to side environments for your character to explore. The dungeons themselves are design in a simplistic manner that there aren't a lot of details to them and they aren't very in-depth at all. You can probably explore most of the dungeons in 15 minutes or so by just constantly running across the screen. The game designers really didn't put much thought into designing long and complicated in-depth dungeons to be explored at all. Just seem very laziness on their part. The world maps for this game are simple 2D artworks too. You basically just have a very small sprite representing your character running across these 2D world map artworks as visual for you trekking across the world for exploration, not very impressive at all. Cross Edge graphics is pretty much Playstation 2 graphics that are upconverted to high definition blu ray. So what's the good news? Well despite the fact that the game is basically a simple 2D artwork game with drawn sprites, it actually looks good with the beautiful colors and clarity of the character artworks. But this is more due to the power of the PS3 and its ability to upscale simple Playstation 2 graphics to high definition blu ray graphics. Kind of makes you wonder how other Playstation 2 games will look if they were upscale to high definition blu ray. In the end, you have simple artwork graphics that look very nice with beautiful colors due to the upscale of 720p of blu ray high definition but looking more like a Playstation 2 game than a Playstation 3 game.
Score: 7/10
MUSIC
"Hey can we have some music, please?"
The music like with the graphics is sub standard at best. The first thing you'll notice is that there aren't any musical tracks that really stand out and grabs your attention at all. The second thing you'll notice is that you seem to be hearing the same 2 or 3 musical scores over and over again. Now there are probably more than 3 musical tracks in this game soundtrack but when you only seem to notice 3 possible musical tracks out of how many available, it's not a good sign. I would say the 2 musical tracks that you notice playing the most is the story dialogue track and the dungeon track. There are probably more than 1 dungeon tracks but at this point in the game, they all sound the same which is not a good thing. The game sound effect is bad too. The one sound effect you'll notice the most is horse stomping or horses running as sound effects for human running or approaching. I don't know why they decided to use horse sound effects for human movements. In addition to the bad sound effects, the voice acting is pretty bland and unimaginative too. The voice acting lacks emotion and they don't seem to fit the characters at all. Other times you can easily tell that the same voice actors are providing the same voices for different characters without making a real effort to make each character sound different that you can't tell it's the same voice actor. Just not a whole lot of effort is put into the voice acting. But than again not a whole lot of effort is put into the music and sound of this game.
Score: 5/10
GAMEPLAY
"Check out my special EX
Skill move!"
We'll combine our Skills in one.
Game Information
Genre: Action Strategy RPG
Publisher: NIS America
Disc: 1 Blu Ray Disc
Memory: 50MB
Players: 1 Player Mode
Supported HD: NTSC,720p
Rating: Teen
Release: May 2009
On the surface the gameplay seem fairly easy in terms of what to do and what your objectives are. But once you get to the glist of the battle system it gets more complicated than that and you'll find out that this game learning curve is a bit harder than most rpgs out there. The game offers a normal and hard mode but first time player should treat normal mode as hard mode and hard mode as super hard mode. The world of Cross Edge is base on different world maps with dungeons connecting to these world maps together as a way to travel. The overall objective is pretty simple for each world map. You just need to go around sending out a search radius to reveal any hidden story event spheres and seal soul crystals. Once you find an event sphere you can enter it to activate the story scene. In some cases an event sphere will just lead to a small story scene while other times there will be a boss fight. Once you find and activate all the event spheres on the world map, the path to the dungeon will be open up. It's possible to skip out on finding soul crystals and releasing souls. Despite the fact that the story and gameplay is base on releasing souls, it doesn't seem like it's mandatory at all in terms of progressing the gameplay. Only certain key event spheres are mandatory in order to remove structures that may block your path from exploring the world map fully. Still skipping on finding and release souls isn't a good idea since you can get cool items as a reward each time you release a soul. But anyways once you clear out and trigger all the event spheres your next task is to travel through the dungeon and make your way to the next world map. Dungeons themselves are basic 2D side to side exploration and they are fairly simple and short. In fact you can run through a dungeon and only have to face maybe 4 battles average. That's how short and quick most of these dungeons are. Dungeon exploration isn't exactly the main focus and selling point of this game. Once you make it through the dungeon than you will arrive in a new map. And of course you repeat the process again of finding event spheres and soul crystals. This is pretty much the entire gameplay of Cross Edge in terms of objective. But the heart of the gameplay is the complicated battle system which we'll go into right now.
The battle system uses a random encounter system for enemy encounters. The encounter rate is pretty decent but the ambush rate or surprise attack rate is very high. It's almost a given that 50% of your encounters with enemies are in a surprise attack. It's a bit annoying having such a high rate for surprise attack. This is a turn base rpg system so you get your turn of action and than the enemy get their turn of action and vice versa depending on who goes first. The problem is that even through its turn base, it's not done in an even way. The turn base is randomized. Meaning at any point during the battle, the enemy or you can get 2 turn in a row. And if the enemy gets 2 turns in a row, it's pretty much game over for you. The frequency of the enemy getting 2 turn in a row is very high like 50% of the time so be aware of it when you are planning your strategy on what to do during battles. The battlefield itself is done in a 2D side to side environment. The enemies will be on the left side in their own grid formation and your party members will be on the right side in their own grid formation. You can only have 4 party members in battle out of the possible 30 party members. It's a bit disappointing to have so few party members to use in battle out of so many to choose from. The good news is that you are able to switch in and out any party members when it's your turn. Party members that take part in battle will gain a bit more experience points than those that are held in reserve. Any action a party member takes whether it's moving to a different grid in the formation, attacking, or healing will require AP, once AP has been consumed up than that party member can't do anymore actions. You can store up and stack up on AP by skipping a turn and doing actions on the next turn. This will allow you the ability to do more actions. Once you take an action on a monster, the action count will begin. During this time, you can build up a hit combo on the monster. The higher the hit combo, the more damage you can do. Once the action count reaches zero, your hit combo will be reset. You can unleash Attack Skills and EX Skills at monsters and they can do the same to you. You need to build up your SP bars if you want to use EX Skills. You build up SP by hitting the enemies, dying, and getting hit back. The best way to gain SP fast is actually getting hit and dying a lot. This is also true for the monsters. Now what makes this battle system very challenging is the fact you need to be aware of your formation on the battle grid and to control your attacks. Monsters area of attack (AOE) skills can easily wipe out your party members. So it's not always a good idea sticking them all together bunched up. Yet at the same time you also have to put them in formation base on their range attacks. You have to make sure that party members are place on the grid where they can reach the enemies base on their range of attack. So sticking them all together isn't a good idea but just randomly separating them all over the grid doesn't help too. Hence a bit of game strategy need to be done. The next thing that you need to be aware of is that you can't just go all out on the enemies. Monsters can build SP and have EX Skills too. Going all out on enemies during battle like other rpgs will only result in the enemies retaliating against you by unloading their EX Skills. This happens quite a lot and it's very cheesy to be one shotted by enemies EX Skills. This is why this game is very hard for the average gamer. You're not use to having to hold back and being in self control instead of just gunning for the enemies. The learning curve on the battle system is a bit steep but with a bit of patience you can get into it once you get use to dying a lot. Haha. Now for the key features of this game.
Search: As you travel through different world maps, you'll need to send out a search radius to uncover event spheres and sealed soul crystals. Your search level will increase as you progress further into the game and you'll need to backtrack and locate hidden soul crystals that needed a higher level search radius to unveil them that you couldn't do before. Party Points: You can get party points at the end of each battle and as a reward for unlocking and completing a Title. Party Points are a nice way for you to be able to further customize each of your character personal attribute stats such as STR, HIT, DEF, MAG, ect. All you need to do is distribute these Party Points to a particular stat of a character to increase it. Skills: Each character in the game will have 8 different set of attack skills that can be assigned to the 4 buttons on the controller of square, cross, triangle, and circle. The attack skills are base on different categories of Down, Burst, and none. Attack Skills that are in the Down category are used to break Down Guard Shield and Burst Attack Skills are used to break Burst Guard Shield. Attack Skills that aren't in those 2 categories has no effect on monster Guard Shields. The level of the skills can be level up base on the number of times you use them in battle as well as the level of the monsters you are using the skill on. EX Skills: Ex Skills are your characters very own unique special attack moves. Each character will have 3 Ex Skills ranging from level 1 to level 3. You need to fill up the SP bar in order to use an EX Skills. A level 1 Ex Skill only require 1 SP bar while say a level 3 EX Skill require 3 SP bar. Branch Combo Skills: The only way to make battles more easier and get a good flow going is by combining regular attack skills into a big Branch Combo Skill attack. You simply can't get through this game by simply just using regular skill attacks. You need to combine them together into various different high level Branch Combo Skill attacks whether it's base on different magic attacks, range attacks, or just pure heavy duty regular attacks combined. There's almost 100 different Branch Combos Skills from the low level to high level ultimate Branch Combo. It's a good idea to find the right Branch Combo for the right team on your party during battles. EX Combo Skills: Ex Combo Skills are similar to Branch Combo Skills with the only difference is that instead of linking regular attack skills together, you are linking EX Skills together to create a devastating EX Combo Skill. Guard Breaks: As soon as battle start, all monsters will have their guard up. This means that all your damage will only be at 50% of what it can be at until you guard break them. Monsters will have both a Down Skill shield and a Burst Skill shield helping to guard them. In order to knock their shield down, you have to use the corresponding skill attack of the shield. So if you want to break the Down shield then you would use Down Skill Attacks till the shield is broken. Once the shield is broken than all your attacks will be at 100% damage. This entire process is known as Guard Break. Synthesis: Being able to create your own equipment and items through synthesis is big main feature in this game. In fact it's pretty much the only way for you to really get new updated gear and items for your party. This is one of the most in-depth synthesis features in an rpg game and very easy to get into but time consuming. First you need to acquire synth recipes. You can find new recipes from releasing souls or as a reward for completing a Title. The synth recipes will list what items, weapons, & armors you can make and the ingredient needed to make them. Ingredients can be item drops from monsters or from converting an item into an ingredient. Once you farm the ingredients you need from the monsters, then it's a simply case of paying the fee needed to synthesize and you can make that item. Some completed synthesis items will be made available to be sold in shops after you have successfully synthesize that item for the first time. Upgrade: This game allow you to further upgrade any weapon, armor, accessory, and active skills to further boost their stats. You can boost these stats from level 1 to level 5 by distributing EP points gain from battles. If you wish to convert a weapon, armor, or accessory into an ingredient or active skill, you'll need to upgrade those items to the full level 5 first. Composite: In addition to upgrading your gears, you can further power up certain attributes of your weapons & armors by compositing them with certain synthesis materials. Convert: Some new active skills and synthesis ingredients can only be obtain from converting a weapon, armor, or accessory into an ingredient and active skill. This can only be done if you have fully upgraded those gears. Titles: In the Database menu you can find a section for Titles. There are about 100 different Titles that you can unlock by completing the criteria set before you base on the Title. While completing Titles are purely optional, it is in your benefit to try and do some because completing Titles will reward you with money, items, synth recipes, and new costumes. Costumes: All the characters in the game can acquire various different costumes that they can equip. These costumes will help boost certain stats for the characters making them more powerful. Costumes will be unlocked once you have release a certain number of souls. TP Exchange: TP gain from battles can be exchange for synthesis recipes, rare items and gear in the TP Exchange menu in the Database Menu. This is actually the only way to get some rare equipment and items that aren't dropped by monsters. Medical Room: The medical room at any Save Point is the only way to fully revive any dead characters outside of using revival items. Of course using the medical room comes with a fee as always.
This gameplay is going to plague with many problems from game flow, to unbalance game mechanics, to difficulty on the game. The gameplay isn't totally bad but it takes a lot of patience and work before you start getting comfortable with it to get some sort of flow and fun going. And that's the main problem with the gameplay in that it does take a lot of work before you start having fun. Whenever a game requires a lot of work is when it start to get in trouble as gameplay shouldn't require a lot of work at all in order to have fun. You'll notice right away that immediately from start to finish that this game will be a constant struggle that will turn a lot of potential players off and away from the game. You'll be struggling with money, trying to update equipment, and just the basic understanding on how to survive battles. Instead of just going with the story and gaining experience points as part of the gameplay flow, in this game, you will require to constantly stop from the story gameplay and spend hours on grinding out experience points to boost your level and farming for drops from monsters in order to synthesize and upgrade your armors and weapons. In most cases such as yours truly, you pretty much end up wearing such low level equipment due to the not wanting to spend ridiculous hours on farming for items so you can synthesize to upgrade your weapon and gear. So let's start at the beginning. Right away you'll notice that the in-game tutorial isn't very helpful at all. The instruction book isn't any better than the in-game tutorial. So you are left on trying to learn this gameplay on your own with trial and error or looking for some sort of a walkthrough or faqs online to help you out. Simply using each fighter different skills on monsters isn't going to be enough. Heck even killing level 5 enemies at the very beginning was hard and a struggle. With lack of healing items, lack of money, and lack of healing spells, things were difficult from the get go. It was a struggle for me just to go from level 1 to level 10 to progress the game. Your party will be getting wiped out from monsters on a regular basis duo to large range attack that can do damage to more than 1 party members to the game cheating with random turn base where enemies get double turn. The biggest cheese problem you'll notice that kills any flow and fun of the game is the fact that even though this is a turn base system, it's randomizes at times and the game cheats allowing the enemy to take 2 turn in a row. The enemy taking 2 turn in a row happens a lot at probably a 50% chance. If the enemy takes 2 turn in a row than it pretty much means game over for you. This cheese factor where the enemy takes 2 turn in a row really becomes very annoying during boss fights later on. Nothing worst than getting the boss down to 20% HP left only for it to cheap and get 2 turns in a row and just wipe out your party. It's one of the reasons why I pretty much gave up on trying to fight the extra bosses. If it was a simple turn base system then boss fights wouldn't be that annoying and more fun but the game likes to cheap a lot. You want battles to be base on skill and not the luck of the draw in hoping that the enemy doesn't get 2 turn in a row. And in this case luck is pretty much what most of the tougher fights are base on. Now getting back to the beginning, using simple regular skill isn't enough to really kill any monsters that are on par with your level. You need to learn how to combo together various different skills to form a Branch Skill Combo attack between party members. I was only able to get a decent game flow going once I was able to find the right Branch Combo Skill attack for my party. And finding the right Branch Skill Combo attacks isn't easy at all. You actually have to go online to try and look for some sort of faqs to help you form these Branch Combo Skills. And players shouldn't have to do that in order to play this game but they do. Sure once you go deeper into the game, you can find various Arcane Tombs that list different Branch Combo Skills but those aren't going to help you early on in the game or midway into the game when you just trying to get some sort of game flow going. And without knowing some of the Branch Combo Skill early on, you will most likely be struggling just trying to get to level 20. And if gamers are struggling and having a hard time just trying to level their party up to level 20, than you know there's a problem here, which brings me up to my next point. Every time you enter a new map, you'll quickly notice the monsters level and compare it to your party level. Right away you'll notice that your party is always under level in this game. This isn't like other rpg game where you can just level up and gain exp points as you play the game and progress the storyline. You won't be able to maintain your party level balance by just playing along with the story. You actually need to stop and spend a few hours grinding out your level to keep in par with the level of the map area you are in. This makes leveling in this game very slow. Right away if you notice your party is getting wiped out by just regular monsters than it means you are too low in level and need to level grind. Level grinding in any game is not fun. Nobody wants to waste hours and hours just to keep their party up on levels but you need to do it here and often. Next to level grinding comes the farming of random monsters in hopes of getting drop items from them so you can synthesize and upgrade your gear. This is the first rpg game that I've played where you can't just buy upgraded gear from shop. You need to first synthesize an item or gear before a shop may put that item for sale in shop. In other words in order for shops to have items for sale, you need to first synthesize them. So the only real way to get updated gear in this game is for you to actually make them yourself. Which isn't exactly fun at all because in order to make new gear for your characters, you need to go running around in various locations and kill certain random monsters and hoping they drop the materials needed for synthesis. Nobody wants to waste hours running around hoping for a certain monster to pop so you can kill it and get the item drop for synthesis. This kind of process is called farming and it's being used in MMORPG. Cross Edge is not a never ending MMORPG for crying out loud. We don't want to level grind and farm for stuff. It's more work than fun. But unfortunately you need to level grind and farm in this game to really progress in it. The last factor is the cheese factor. I already mention one of the cheese factors in enemies and bosses randomly cheating and getting 2 turns in a row so they can wipe out your party. The second cheese factor is that bosses and enemies can pretty much one shot party members or even entire party with their EX Skills. This happens a lot in boss fights. You can't even go all out on bosses because doing so means they will build SP and will retaliate with an EX Skill that will pretty much one shot your party or party members. Heck they pretty much will get one shotted eventually which is annoying. Doesn't matter how high your HP or defense or level are. You just know that big EX Skill from the boss is coming and hope that you lucky that at least 1 party member will survive or else it's game over. This is where the balance of the game mechanics is out of whack. Boss fights aren't base on skills of the players at all but dumb random luck that you hoping the game doesn't screw you by giving 2 turns to the boss or getting one shotted by an EX skill. It just makes the gameplay very difficult and annoying. Level grinding, farming, and cheese factor of the gameplay pretty much kills it for any average gamer looking for a good fun game to play. The gameplay isn't entirely bad, it's just you really need to put in a lot of effort and work into learning it and willing to level grind in order to enjoy it. And I doubt that the majority of the rpgers are willing to do that. This gameplay is strictly for the hardcore rpgers out there. And I consider myself a hardcore rpgers and even I was turned off by it. I can handle the level grind and farming but I really can't handle the unbalance of the turn base system and getting one shotted by EX skills. I don't want to go into a boss fight hoping that luck is on my side that the game doesn't cheat for the boss and give it 2 turns or that I don't instantly get one shotted by an EX Skill. Gameplay should be fun and enjoyable at a good pace. Cross Edge gameplay is totally opposite of that. It's at a slow pace game and feels more like work than fun. I'm going to give it a 7 because the gameplay really is unique and in-depth. It's just not for the average rpgers out there.
Score: 7/10
EXTRAS/REPLAY
Welcome to Extra Bonus Map #1
On the bright side of things, the extras and replay value of Cross Edge is top notch if you are willing to tackle them. One of the great new features in this new age of gaming is the introduction of added download content that both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 offer with their online service network. Normally we don't include extra download content as part of the review because they are separate from the actual game and sometimes these extra download content comes way after the game has already been released to stores and comes with a price of purchase on these extra download content. However for this case we'll include some of the extra download content because they are free. Before starting or during the game, you can go to the Playstation Store and download some free extra packages from the Cross Edge store on PSN. You can get quite a few free extra items packages and free bonus dungeons for this game. The items packages will automatically load up in your inventory after you download them from the PSN. And the free bonus dungeons will install automatically in your game. The free bonus dungeons are pretty much copied version of the dungeons in the game but they carry some new extra chests so exploring them for these chests is a good way to get some much needed extra items. The real value comes from those free extra item packages where you can really get some high level items early on in the game. Now for the actual in game extras, the game offers them during the story game and during the post game. In game extras during the story game comes from unlocking all the Titles in the Database Menu. By meeting the criteria of certain Titles and unlocking them, you can gain some much needed extra money and items as well as unlock character costumes and artworks in the Gallery menu. Unlocking all the Titles is strictly optional but if you actually want to try and unlock all the Titles, be prepare to put in over 100 hours of extra gameplay for them. I'm not kidding about spending over 100 hours unlocking all the Titles. It's a very grueling and time sinking task. But hey it gives you 100+ hours of extra gameplay right? Now if that doesn't scare you off than how about trying the post game extra. After you finish with the regular story gameplay, bonus content will appear on the last world map for you to do. You can collect new souls and we fight some of the game bosses again at higher level. Clearing out the bonus content and extra boss fights on the last world map will unlock the first bonus map available in normal mode. The first bonus map contains even more high level enemies as well as 12 extra high level boss fights that you can do over and over again. I was only able to defeat 2 of the extra high level bosses before giving up. These high level bosses are strictly for the hard core players that are willing to grind their levels and upgrade their gears to level 200 and above. But the challenge is there if you willing to tackle them for extra content.
As for replay ability, the game offers a hard mode for you to tackle next. If you crazy and brave enough, you can do a New Game+ and replay the game again on hard mode which is pretty much super hard mode in my opinion since normal mode was hard enough. Why do the hard mode? Simple, the second bonus map can only be unlocked in hard mode. So by replaying the game again on hard mode and clearing out the first bonus map of defeating all 12 extra bosses, the second bonus map will be unlock with even bigger bosses with the ultimate boss in the game to challenge. I'm not that hardcore to even try this game on hard mode. Still when it comes to extra challenges and replay value with extra content, I do have to stay this game does offer it. You just got to be an extremely hard core rpg gamer to take them on.
Score: 9/10
Cross Edge is a game where the concept behind it started out good but seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and the developers didn't know what to do with it. The developers don't seem to know if they wanted to market the game to the broader average gamers or just toward the smaller hardcore NIS America rpgers that have supported them in the past. Whether it was intentional or unintentional, Cross Edge just ended up toward the latter for the hardcore rpgers out there due to the difficult game mechanics and unbalance gameplay. Despite the sub standard storyline, the gameplay isn't too bad if you stick with it to the end and it's truly is a very unique and in-depth gameplay. It's just that Cross Edge isn't really for everyone or for the average rpgers out there. Cross Edge is a game that requires a lot of work put into it and a lot of hours. And that is where the main problem is. When a game becomes too much work and you need to put in 100 - 200 hours into it, the fun of playing the game start to disappear pretty quickly. If you got a job or school, then you probably want to skip this game entirely unless you find the idea of spending 100+ hours grinding out your level and farming random monsters for item drops just so you can upgrade and synthesize your weapons and armors. This is something that only the hardcore rpgers would have time to do. Depending on what kind of rpg gamer you are, Cross Edge could be the kind of game for you or the game that's not worth putting up with. And I believe the latter will ring true for most gamers out there including this reviewer.
