hands, regardless of what the YouTubes tell you. Let’s say you threw some beef, tomatoes,

peppers, cheese, noodles, herbs, and spices in said blender. Even if your machine could

take it, you can’t just call the resultant pulp “lasagna.” It just doesn’t work

that way. Similarly, you can’t just lump together decent combat concepts, several stables

of franchise characters, and an intricate weapons system and presume that the result

will be a decent RPG. You’ve just got a jumbled pile of gaming parts. There needs

to be some effort to bring these things together, be it baking or a decent story. And frankly,

you’ve got a better chance of your PS3 overheating.

So you’ve got two of three spatially-displaced teenagers, one of whom is a quiet, confused

girl, the other is a gun crazy hot-head with a zipper pull that weighs more than the rest

of his clothes combined. I’d say “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” but I’ve

got three more minutes to kill. They wake up in a grove, get attacked by monsters in

a very “here’s the tutorial” kind of a way, realize that they’re suffering from

amnesia, and encounter... Morrigan. Yes, that Morrigan. From Darkstalkers. Who’s also

spatially displaced, and suffering from amnesia.

TJ’S TIPS FOR RPG-WRITING DUMBASSES, SPECIAL EDITION. Amnesia is NOT INTERESTING. It’s

why Final Fantasy VIII feels fake as a three-zenny refractor. When your party is wandering around,

all “Oh, I can’t remember anything,” it divorces them from the past. Hell, even

fake memories are better than no memories at all. And another thing, and this pertains

directly to this game and others like it: When you change characters’ names seemingly

arbitrarily, especially in a VERY niche game as you have here... leaving the Japanese vocal

track in just serves to underline the level of meddling that’s gone on. If you’re

going to pander to the middle, in politics or in localization, you lose more from your

base than you stand to gain. Full stop.

And that’s kind of a shame, because the hybrid tactical-AP system with mid-fight personnel

switches, hyper attacks, and a focus on action economy is exactly what I’d like in RPG

combat. Unfortunately, this implementation leaves out a fair deal of information, including

the range of your attacks (without going through two menus), why in particular you can’t

use a particular attack (be it insufficient AP, insufficient range, insufficient super-hyper-shiny

points, or any of another number of reasons), what these powers actually do (without the

aforementioned two menus) or what your items do at all. And while aliasing the “end turn,”

“switch,” and “shift” functions to directions on the left analog stick is a really

spiffy idea, it doesn’t shine through the balance issues, including horrendous accuracy,

nor the mechanical problems of the display itself. This combination of sprites and 3D

foes not only looks jarring, but get any semblance of a fight going and the framerate starts

making Mega Man 3 look smooth.

Let’s face it, the basic idea was pretty cool. And who wouldn’t want to see Morrigan

and Etna in the same game? But when you’re chewing through mountains of plot - or what

passes for it in this amnesiac world - while slogging through dicey combat where you’re

lucky to land two hits out of twenty... it’s untenable, dood. You can have the finest ingredients

and ideas, but without enough batter to hold ‘em together, your okonomiyaki is just a

pile of hot cabbage. Cross Edge: It’s a pile of hot cabbage.