Cross Edge is a frustrating wreck that no human should ever endure!

User Rating: 2 | Cross Edge PS3
I'm a big JRPG fan, and since I played games like Disgaea and Atelier Iris, I was looking forward to characters like Etna, Prinny and Marie.

The game begins spouting all kinds of tutorials in your face, without giving you a chance to try any of the mentioned features, it simply makes you read a wall of text and asks you if you want to read it again. So you get bombarded with all this useless info that you can hardly remember anything. This was the first flaw, games have to gradually explain and demonstrate how its played. I played for 50 hours and I still didn't understand most of it. They just leave you to figure it all out by yourself.

The visuals are a disgrace for PS3, it looks like a NES game, and the sprites will look blurry on your HDTV. Unlike something smooth like Blazblue, sprites are animated with just a few frames. So it really looks outdated and nowhere near the PS3 standard.

There is only the world map to explore, and a few hallways that connect other world maps, so you will just be running around and fighting monsters. They don't even tell you where to go, its up to you to search every inch of the world with the search function. Every time you use it, the random encounter draws near. They don't even give you a hint like "to your left" or "across the mountains", they simply leave you to wander around for hours, and if you missed it by an inch, you could be walking aimlessly and searching in the wrong places for 10 hours or more, all while constantly being annoyed by the enemies.

The combat seems kinda easy to grasp at first, but soon you will be getting a lot of characters and things will get hard to wrap your brain around. What I really hate with the combat system, is that its slow as hell and it takes forever to kill a few wolves later on. Looking outdated is one thing, but why cant it run any faster? Every attack has to hit 10 times for 15 damage, why not just hit for 150 damage and get it over with ? They even included a button to skip all of the attack animations, you can even enable it in the options to be always activated, but it's still slow as you will need to farm and grind a lot. Your turn is over when you deplete all of your AP, and every attack costs AP. Then the enemy turn begins, and you just watch them attack your characters, some enemies even go 10 times in a row. It even takes whole 3 seconds to load a battle, yeah each time you go into battle you will be looking at a frozen screen. Shouldn't PS3 be able to handle a few sprites?

I even reached the final boss and couldn't beat him. I noticed he was 30 levels above me, so I went in a random battle to see how fast I could level up. I'll spare you the math, but I calculated and it would take me 50 hours of farming! Why would anyone make a game like that? And that was on easy difficulty setting, if I chose easy it has to be easy! Why must it force me to farm experience. I don't mind a bit of farming, but that much ?! The combat is so slow and complex to learn that it gets tedious after the first few hours. For some reason they made some enemies look like 2D sprites and others are 3D models, why would they combine something like that? It's a horrible idea and it looks awful. If you killed 3 enemies with 1 attack, you have to watch them die one by one, and each will give you an annoying message "You have obtained this item", it really gets frustrating after a few hours, and you will be farming for more than 100 hours!

There are so many characters to choose from that any choice you make will be a bad combination, so no matter who you pick you will have to level them up for a long time, and you cant tell what skills a character will have or if he will be useless. Oh and you will not have enough points or items to invest in all of them, so picking your favorite 4 to stick with is impossible.

To top it all off, the story is really boring and generic, its the usual "dark God is being resurrected and the forces of good must prevail over the forces of evil", oh yeah and don't forget about the power of friendship! I really gave this game a chance, but it sucks in every way.

To sum it all up, its overly complex to learn and not explained good, its very slow so it becomes tedious, and a farmfest so you will be fighting the boring enemies many times for no purpose. I played and endured a lot of bad games, but Cross Edge is simply not tolerable in any way. Face it, nobody likes to farm, farming is boring, and this game is farming incarnate. It's a frustrating wreck that no human should ever endure!