The PS3 has been experiencing a shortage of major RPG’s, but now things are slowly starting to turn around, and Cross Edge is another step in that direction. And it’s not like the regular RPG; it’s a tactical roleplaying game. While there are many such games floating around for the PS2 system, Cross Edge takes a slightly different approach, partly by compiling characters from all over the Japanese fighting and roleplaying history and allowing you to build a party consisting of them in an original story.
How does this come to pass? Cross Edge is the place where forgotten thoughts, memories, or ideas go, the second they are washed away from your mind. It’s here that the collaberative efforts of Japan’s biggest game developers (NIS, Gust, Idea Factory, Namco Bandai, and Capcom) come into play. Characters from Darkstalkers, Ar Tonelico, Mana Khemia, and more unite in a storyline each developer has banded together to construct.
The combat system plays out like many other tactical RPG’s. It takes place on a turnbased grid, and each face button executes a different attack, each attack taking up a specified amount of action points, of which you have a limited amount. However, this isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. Things only just start to get interesting once you begin executing combinations, where multiple characters attack together for certain effects. In total, there are over 100 combos that can be uncovered, probably over dozens of hours of play. It really is a complex system, especially when you put into consideration all the different subsystems taking place onscreen in each battle, in the form of numbers, gauges, and diagrams, not all of which have even yet been explained by the developers.
There are dozens of characters to encounter and join you along the way, most of which hail from other Japanese series’ and some of which are original to Cross Edge. In addition to collecting these characters you can find different costumes for each, and sometimes even swap costumes between them. The character models look very cool, even though they are low-res and 2D-looking in homage to each game’s origins.
From what people can tell, Cross Edge is shaping up very nicely, and will hopefully provide players with a very complex and rewarding experience, especially for those into Japanese gaming. The plan is that Cross Edge will be released this May 19th.
