CrossCode's Downloadable Content

Today’s gonna be a nice, quick, short rant, which is a real thing that can actually happen, because we’re going to be looking at the DLC for the minor hit Indie RPG, CrossCode!



A New Home: And the reason it’s gonna be a short rant today is because, predictably, CrossCode’s downloadable content package is a good, solid piece of work.  More Lea, more words for Lea to say, more story to the Crossworlds experience as the game-within-the-game is finally completed, more actual plot with Lea as Evotars are eased into a new existence, more exploration and involvement of major characters like Shizuna, the Evotar Schneider, and C’Tron, more dungeon-racing with Emilie, more expertly-crafted puzzles that I respect and hate, more dueling with Apollo, and, of course, more Lea-hugs.  A New Home is very much what a fan wants from a DLC, a true-to-form continuation of the world, characters, and adventures that they liked in the first game.  At a price of $9, A New Home fairly charges for the amount of play-time you’ll get out of it, and it’s a good time overall.  Recommended!

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Yup, that’s it.  That’s all I got.  Short rant today; I told you as much just a couple paragraphs ago.  Go on, now.

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Well
I mean
I guess I sort of have a minor gripe I could talk about.

Okay, A New Home is good and all, right?  Just want to make sure that’s clear.  It’s good and I like it and it’s a good deal if you like CrossCode, which most people do.

Buuuuut, it does kind of feel like maybe the developer shortchanged the main game a little bit with the intention of selling that content later in this DLC.

I mean...a ton of A New Home is basically just completing the unfinished business and tying up the loose threads of the main story of CrossCode, most of which didn’t need to be delayed.  I mean, sure, the in-game developers’ completion of the Crossworlds adventure conveniently and elegantly fits into the after-game timeframe, but it could have fit just fine into the main story of CrossCode, with the Crossworlds adventure just being complete from the start, or even having its final parts released during the main game’s course.  Likewise, C’tron’s secret could have been revealed and worked through in the game proper without over-stuffing the main narrative (particularly with the extra time potentially provided by adding the final parts of Crossworlds).

Or, well, he could’ve just been on the level, a dorky player who was a good friend to Lea and Emilie.  Certainly nothing about C’tron’s plot twist feels like it’s necessary, nor does it develop the villain it involves to any meaningful degree.  So little would really have been lost had the entire secret nature of C’tron been cut, that, when I think about it, it starts feeling like a hasty addition created specifically as a tease to entice players to purchase the DLC, rather than a strong story beat genuinely intended to be a part of the plot’s course.  Hell, I feel like the type of human drama that C’tron’s story invokes is close enough to that of Evotar Lukas’s that all the DLC really needed would’ve been a better exploration of the latter,* and Evotar Lukas’s story actually did have in-story reason to be delayed until a post-game adventure.

Most significantly, it kinda feels like the developer decided to hold the ending of CrossCode ransom with the DLC.  Sure, CrossCode HAS an ending, but that ending’s basically just a placeholder--the villain’s been stopped, the adventure’s done, but the consequences of the adventure are left up in the air, as Lea’s put to sleep and her friends prepare to bring the existence and question of Evotars to the executives in charge of Crossworlds.  If you didn’t follow through on the right sidequests, then you can see the bad ending no problem, but if you did everything you should have, then the only way to see the fate of Lea and her kind is to buy the DLC.  Otherwise, what happens with Lea and the Evotars, the most important character and arguably the biggest issue in the game, is left up in the air.

I mean, I’m not crazy that this is a problem, right?  Surely it can’t just be me.  Like, if a major game publisher tried this--oh what am I saying, when major game publishers have tried this--you can expect a sizable public outcry, with customers and prominent Youtube gaming journalist personalities pointing out that this isn’t fair to the consumer who paid full price for an incomplete product, justly decrying the act as paywalling the ending of the game behind microtransactions.  But CrossCode is an Indie RPG, and very likable, and the DLC is enjoyable and satisfying, so...what, we’re just okay with it, then?  Not going to point out the fault in something we’d be crying for blood over had the crime been committed by the usual suspects?  I am, and long have been, inclined to treat Indie RPGs with kiddie gloves, but that’s far away from just giving it a free pass when a game pulls something that you’d expect from Activision-Blizzard or Ubisoft.

So I’m just gonna say it.  I think this DLC is scummy.  I think that the developer for CrossCode made a scummy, greedy decision that took advantage of its customers when it paywalled an adequate ending to the game.  A New World is satisfying, engaging, on-brand fun at a reasonable price, and it’s scummy.  CrossCode is pretty universally loved, so that’s probably quite a hot take, but it won’t exactly be my first, and this is how I see it.  Good work on the great DLC, Radical Fish Games, and in the same breath, shame on you.














* I feel like Evotar Schneider’s existential quandary is fixed weirdly quickly in A New Home, and it’s even weirder how all his friends seem to prioritize the fun of finishing the raid over helping him deal with it.  Like, yeah, Luke, could you put a pin in that whole thing of grappling with the horror of existing as a computer program when all your memories are that of a physical being until we’re done with our Leroy Jenkins reenactment?  You’re bringing the mood down!  So inconsiderate.

CrossCode's Puzzles

A worthwhile RPG by virtue of its characters and story, CrossCode is also a solid game in just about every facet of its gameplay.  It’s 1 of those Indie RPGs that shows off the fact that games made by smaller developers can be just as tight, polished, and multi-faceted mechanically as those made by any larger game studio--considerably more so, in fact, given what the modern-day so-called AAA RPG experience looks like, with sloppy, embarrassing garbage like Starfield and Babylon’s Fall as representatives.  And of special note among these gameplay virtues are CrossCode’s puzzles, enough that I’d like to take a moment to just appreciate them with today’s rant.

First of all, the puzzles in CrossCode are pleasingly creative.  While at their foundation they generally come down to either a game of billiards, hitting the right targets at the right moments with precision and careful, analyzed positions, angles, and ricochets, or simple platforming, CrossCode’s creators keep finding new ways to dress up their fundamentals to keep them fresh and different from the start of a 40-hour game right to its end.  They’re always adding and refining new objects and mechanics to the puzzles in ways that build off of the player’s hard-won practical knowledge, but also add new wrinkles and complications to it, and evolving the forms of the player’s billiards-ricochet projectiles with elemental upgrades as the game continues enhances the puzzles’ versatility again and again.  It reminds me of puzzle-heavy RPGs based around player tools, like Wild Arms 1, only unlike WA1 and most of its brethren, there never came a point when this continued introduction and exploration of new tools and mechanics started to feel overplayed or annoying.  In fact, CrossCode’s ability to offer refreshing new spins on its puzzles that walk a skillful line between overuse of the same fundamentals and annoying over-complication is so great, that my favorite puzzle device in the game turned out to be the twist introduced in the final dungeon from the post-game DLC!

But then, walking tightropes is something CrossCode excels at.  In the midst of paying homage to and incorporating aesthetics from its inspirations like classic Phantasy Star, the Playstation 1 era, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and of course several MMORPGs, plus throwing in easter eggs and references to a wide variety of geeky stuff like Hololive VTubers, Temmie-chan, and goddamn Marauder Shields, CrossCode somehow still manages to find a sweet spot of its own, strong identity.  In an era where audiences have started catching on to the fact that simply lampshading a flaw or trope isn’t any better than using that flaw/trope in earnest, CrossCode manages to design a scenario of a game-within-a-game that allows it the adequate wiggle-room to both incorporate and poke fun at the silly parts of video games.  Even its soundtrack is an exercise in finding a positive middle ground, as it incorporates signature bits and pieces of music from foundational games like Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star, and the Kirby series, but transforms them into a new musical entity as a whole.

And the second way in which CrossCode’s puzzles deserve recognition is yet another case of the game managing to hit a very difficult bullseye: their level of challenge.  Typically in an RPG, puzzles lean into an extreme on 1 side or another.  Either they’re by and large a bunch of color-coded, shape-recognition baby stuff, which makes the puzzle element of an RPG much more akin to a chore than a gameplay feature, or it’s a bunch of Alundra 1 or “Palm trees and 8” shit, which quickly becomes frustrating to such a degree that the natural instinct is to simply lose interest in the game.  Or it’s a Legend of Zelda title, and it’s somehow both extremes of ease and difficulty at the same time, with the unpleasantness of each.

Finding that key spot between too easy and the far worse too hard is tricky to pull off even a few times in an RPG...and yet CrossCode manages to do it again, and again, and again, over scores of hours, tons of quests, and more than a dozen areas and dungeons, all of whose content is predominantly made up of puzzle-solving.  Nearly every puzzle in the game held some degree of challenge to figuring out its solution, and yet I almost never felt like I was out of my depth with it.  The solution to any of CrossCode’s puzzles always seems to be within your grasp with a bit of experimental trial-and-error and rational planning, and until you grasp it, you generally never feel completely lost, but rather a sense of expectation that you’re going to be able to figure this out.*  And keep in mind, it’s not like the difficulty of the puzzle element of CrossCode stays static from start to finish; its brainteasers grow in complexity and requisite cleverness as you progress through the game.  So that means that not only does CrossCode know how to walk the line between ease and challenge, it also knows how to do so while scaling itself accurately to the player’s growing experience and ability to parse out solutions as she/he plays.

So yeah, between managing to incorporate exactly as much creativity to stay fresh without getting carried away and tiresomely over-complicated, and striking that happy balance between always being reasonably within a player’s reach but never tiringly facile, CrossCode might very well carry the distinction of being the greatest RPG I’ve ever played in terms of its puzzles.  It’s not an element of the game that I particularly care about, admittedly,** but it’s still clear just how much skill and work has gone into perfecting this part of CrossCode, and kudos to its creators for their efforts in crafting arguably the best puzzle RPG out there!











* Now, whether or not you have the skill and reflexes to actually carry the solution out, that’s sometimes a different matter.  If I ever meet any of the developers of CrossCode in person, the first thing I’m doing after shaking their hand and thanking them for a good, fun game, is slapping them across the face for that final puzzle in Vermillion Tower.


** Brutally honest truth be told, I have to admit that even CrossCode’s masterful suite of puzzles annoyed and bored me.  But that’s because I’m me, and “me” is a person who only cares about the storytelling elements of an RPG and sees all gameplay stuff, from minigames to puzzles to combat, as mostly extraneous filler.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t still recognize, objectively, when 1 of these elements is extremely well-done, even if I don’t myself enjoy it.