In post 50, Nahdia wrote:-CrossCode, which at this point (I'm like... 1/3 the way through?) I'm pretty sure is gonna go down as one of my favorite games of all time.
okay, so after spending all my evenings this week and all day today, i have finished CrossCode (what's out now anyway... apparently there is future content still planned). it is 3am, i really should just go to bed, but i have lots of thoughts about this game and i want to get them out NOW before i risk losing some of them
Okay so I'll talk briefly about the gameplay first, because most of my strong feelings are on the story. CrossCode is an isometric RPG with a simple but deep and satisfying real-time combat system and a heavy focus on puzzles. Lots and lots of puzzles. Sometimes puzzles that, when you enter a room, make you want to just close the game. Or look up a tutorial on Youtube... not that I would ever do that
.
honestly, the gameplay is a big part of what impressed me and kept me playing this game. i rarely sink my teeth into a game this large (i clocked ~40 hours at completion, including a healthy amount of sidequests and grinding for good loot before i battled the final boss). i've had a bit of a falling out with RPGs in general because i find they just ask more investment than i'm willing to give, but CrossCode certainly earned my engagement via its mechanics in addition to its story... with an asterisk on both of those areas. the game does occasionally stumble when introducing a new enemy or puzzle element and failing to explain how to interact with it in a non-obvious way. but for the most part, mechanics are CrossCode's strong point. which makes it all the more surprising to me that I invested so much time into this game and left feeling satisfied. usually what keeps me invested in a game is its story, and excellent mechanics are just a nice bonus. but in this case... well, it's complicated.
i'll just say right off the bat that i did overall like the story of CrossCode. I loved the setting, but this was kind of a gimmie. CrossCode is set in a fictional MMORPG (which is itself located on an in-universe real far off planet and uses "instant matter" to create enemies and puzzles). My first MMORPG was World of Warcraft, when I was
eleven
, and I played it basically every second I could when I wasn't at school or when my brother wasn't having his turn on the communal computer. So I am deeply nostalgic for MMORPGs, not as a genre of video game itself, but for the setting and the social interactions that come from that. this is also why I unironically enjoyed Sword Art Online... I know, I know. So CrossCode had a pretty hefty bonus right out of the gate.
The main cast was also strong! Main character Lea is a mostly silent protagonist (there are in-game reasons for this) with a surprising amount of character. The deuteragonist Sergey Asimov (a bit on the nose there but alright) is a bit flat, but still a perfectly likable character with consistent motivations and the like. The rest of the core cast are all varying degrees of charming. Emilia, the third most prominent character in the game, is a great character imo. Her relationship with Lea is one half of the emotional core of the game, and it mostly works if being a bit saccharine. Her lines are also far and away the funniest in the game.
The larger supporting cast on the other hand is... fine at best. And the antaognists/villains feel like they were written by Marvel. Which is to say they're super generic guys doing evil things because... business? Or whatever? The main antagonist narratively is never even a major threat in the actual gameplay. Instead, the real big-bad who you do face down at the end of the game, has his duties as final-boss taken by... someone else.
And the core plot is also a success and generally well-executed on... for the first 95% of the game anyway. Then the ending comes. I'll discuss the ending in a moment. Suffice to say, the call to action, the big mid-story twist, the actual events driving the story forward? All good.
Okay, but the ending though. And uh, spoiler warning obviously. I won't ruin the best reveals (there's only one major twist, and it comes less than half-way through the game).
Trigger Warning:
suicide
The ending of CrossCode is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that the two major villains, Gautham and Sidwell, have really... weird endings that just don't work or satisfy. Gautham has been a strange character throughout, to the point where even the other characters react with confusion to his actions in-game. But he is complicit and even a participant in the big bad (Sidwell)'s morally awful acts, so he's certainly a villain. We only know bits and pieces of his character through fuzzy flashback memories and stuff we learn from Sergey, who loosely knew him years ago. So like, in essence, he's never fleshed out until the very end. In the very last levels of the game we finally learn about his motivations: Gautham is obsessed with the pure creative process and wants a player worthy to interact with the levels he's created. He stops Sidwell from thwarting the heroes' plan just to get you to do his puzzles and fight his big boss at the end. Which is... weird, but whatever.
But then something wild happens. Gautham, the REAL PERSON (not the player character in the game) shows up. And jumps to his death. It's played as this huge emotional moment and I could tell I was supposed to be sad but really I was just shocked and confused. Sergey explains that Gautham must have been consumed the burden of the terrible things he's done, but the way it's stated seems to be an effort to absolve him which just... didn't work for me. Ultimately the character was kind of inscrutable from beginning to end. He needed a lot more clear development. SPEAKING OF NEEDING MORE DEVELOPMENT...
Sidwell, the actual big bad... less "strange" and more "literally who?" Again you see and hear bits and pieces about him. But overall he's just a nothing character. which makes the confrontation at the end that much less satisfying. I enjoyed seeing Lea clock him in the face and Sergey yell at him, but it wasn't this huge satisfying moment of the villain finally being defeated. It was more the cheap satisfaction of watching a Nazi get punched. Because I felt nothing for this man. Which made it all the more weird when, in his very last lines, the game suggests that there's a weird Father/Daughter dynamic between him and Lea which............
WHAT?!
.
This is CrossCode's core failing more than anything. It is a story with no coherent message. And yeah, maybe games don't always have to say something, but there are moments like this where it feels like it's TRYING to say something. Gautham's death is another of these big emotional moments, but it just doesn't work. Lea's grappling with her identity and her friendship with Emilia are all well and good, but the game's narrative is absent of actual themes besides like... friendship I guess? But even then it doesn't totally stick the landing. One of Lea's closest friends, C'tron, is just not present at all for the final act. There are multiple moments in this act where Lea has heartfelt conversations with her friends (including a couple she barely ever interacted with... but okay) and there are tearful goodbyes in the last scene... but C'tron just isn't there! He announced a couple of days earlier he was taking a break from the game for "personal reasons" and that was it! Maybe it's realistic, but it's also bad writing. If the writers were trying to make a point about the fickleness of online relationships or something, examine that further! There is one conspiracy theory explanation for C'tron's disappearance which technically makes sense, but it's not a satisfying idea so much as fridge logic bait.
It's now past 4am and I've written way too much. Ultimately, CrossCode's writing is fun at times but deeply flawed. Still, a mixture of nostalgia and great mechanics will indeed make this game go down as one of my favorites.