Dimension Cross (Android)
May. 31st, 2024 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn a Star Ocean-inspired opening, Kyle is one of humanity’s explorers on the spaceship Zero, but it makes a rough landing on an unknown planet and it turns out the captain might be manipulating and exploiting the locals. Joined by his robot buddy and several of the locals, Kyle goes on an adventure to try to figure out what’s going on.
This was the last game from the KEMCO collection I bought last fall, and it unfortunately broke my momentum: It’s melding a bunch of the usual EXE-Create systems with some new ideas, and while in theory a lot of what’s here interested me, it didn’t come together well.
The big and obvious new thing: The graphics are 3D! There’s jumping! And by jumping, you can collect gold and silver coins to trade for prizes! They try to introduce puzzles that make use of that mechanic, but unfortunately the engine isn’t that great, so action/timing puzzles don’t actually work well, even on a device with physical buttons. The coins are always floating in the air, so they’re really an excuse to walk to every corner of the map and jump there.
The paid version of the game comes with free IAP points, so I bought the XP doubler right off the bat. This was a necessary move: You have far fewer options in battle than many EXE-Create games, especially early on, and the boasted “Break Skill” system for attacking body parts isn’t actually that helpful in making battles strategic. They have the standard EXE-Create weapons lottery and synthesizing, and you need the Forging Ore to carry over all the properties to a new weapon (like in Liege Dragon).
The difficulty is wildly inconsistent: The second dungeon (keep in mind, this is before you’ve even been to a town) has giants and dragons in the random encounter pool, which are substantially stronger than the bats and oozes. The rewards are great if you beat them, but they can also destroy you fairly easily and running away isn’t assured. And this is before you have any ready access to upgrades, and the only full healing is hiking back to the regen pod at the beginning of the first dungeon.
And the translation, wow. I mean, it might be badly written in the original too, but the dialogue is stilted and weird enough to feel machine-translated. The characterization is awkward and inconsistent. The robot buddy is clearly intended to be a comic relief character, but he doesn’t actually manage that. And there’s the whole fake-out that it’s a star-spanning sci-fi game to begin with; you’re on a medieval planet with some advanced tech that humanity introduced recently.
(A look for spoilers online revealed the total game is about 10 hours, and ends rather abruptly with no post-game. I made it three hours in and just couldn’t drag myself back to it.)
Overall: They were trying something new with the graphics, but they didn’t work the kinks out of the engine. And the story is worse, this feels like a lousy fanfic retelling of a Star Ocean game that got Google Translated. I gave up after a few hours.
This was the last game from the KEMCO collection I bought last fall, and it unfortunately broke my momentum: It’s melding a bunch of the usual EXE-Create systems with some new ideas, and while in theory a lot of what’s here interested me, it didn’t come together well.
The big and obvious new thing: The graphics are 3D! There’s jumping! And by jumping, you can collect gold and silver coins to trade for prizes! They try to introduce puzzles that make use of that mechanic, but unfortunately the engine isn’t that great, so action/timing puzzles don’t actually work well, even on a device with physical buttons. The coins are always floating in the air, so they’re really an excuse to walk to every corner of the map and jump there.
The paid version of the game comes with free IAP points, so I bought the XP doubler right off the bat. This was a necessary move: You have far fewer options in battle than many EXE-Create games, especially early on, and the boasted “Break Skill” system for attacking body parts isn’t actually that helpful in making battles strategic. They have the standard EXE-Create weapons lottery and synthesizing, and you need the Forging Ore to carry over all the properties to a new weapon (like in Liege Dragon).
The difficulty is wildly inconsistent: The second dungeon (keep in mind, this is before you’ve even been to a town) has giants and dragons in the random encounter pool, which are substantially stronger than the bats and oozes. The rewards are great if you beat them, but they can also destroy you fairly easily and running away isn’t assured. And this is before you have any ready access to upgrades, and the only full healing is hiking back to the regen pod at the beginning of the first dungeon.
And the translation, wow. I mean, it might be badly written in the original too, but the dialogue is stilted and weird enough to feel machine-translated. The characterization is awkward and inconsistent. The robot buddy is clearly intended to be a comic relief character, but he doesn’t actually manage that. And there’s the whole fake-out that it’s a star-spanning sci-fi game to begin with; you’re on a medieval planet with some advanced tech that humanity introduced recently.
(A look for spoilers online revealed the total game is about 10 hours, and ends rather abruptly with no post-game. I made it three hours in and just couldn’t drag myself back to it.)
Overall: They were trying something new with the graphics, but they didn’t work the kinks out of the engine. And the story is worse, this feels like a lousy fanfic retelling of a Star Ocean game that got Google Translated. I gave up after a few hours.
