The only exciting thing about this game is the artwork on the box.

Video game boxes used to tell you something about the games. Flip it over and it’ll describe gameplay, give you a short synopsis of the story, or at the very least throw you a bone as to what genre the game belonged to. Now the boxes treat details about their content like I’ve tied them to a chair and I’m trying to torture military secrets out of them. When I heard that Cross Edge was an RPG, hard-to-find, and good, I pictured something like Lunar:The Silver Star Story Complete. So when the game’s opening cut scene played exciting music over what is, as best I can tell, a slide show of things they found on Deviant Art, the epic immensity of the game before me overwhelmed my tiny RPG-loving heart until I couldn’t contain myself, and I stared at the parade of character art and couldn’t help but shout out, “Who the hell are all these people?”

Stretching back to the days of the PS2, PS1 and even into the SNES, RPGs were a big affair. Games like Earthbound, Valkyrie Profile, and .hack 4 still sell, and I only have to skip heating my house for one month in the winter to afford them (one of them). Unfortunately, the same genre on the PS3 has become homogenized to the point where if a game wasn’t an anime RPG with a conglomeration of sexy characters with no distinguishing features on the box art, it would stand out like Snoop Dogg at a Bavarian polka fest. The only difference for Cross Edge is that by amassing 30 characters from a variety of different games, you couldn’t fit them all in a Japanese subway car, let alone a single piece of box art.

Yes, a crossover game that scoured the PS3 for enough playable characters to qualify for statehood, Cross Edge does so many things wrong that I want to send it to one of those prisons where they’ll chain it to a heavy iron ball and make it break rocks all day to think about what it did. The premise involves all these characters waking up with a severe case of CPDA (Cliched Plot-Device Amnesia) in a world full of monsters and pre-rendered backgrounds with not much else around except the existential question as to why anyone would want to play a game with less in it than the space between earth and Alpha Centauri. Occasionally, the player will find a story event or a “save point,” (which, because you can save anywhere outside a dungeon, actually has more in common with a standard RPG town, albeit occurring on a single screen with a generic pre-rendered background) but you must literally search for them, examining a small portion of the world map at a time, hoping something will appear. Because God knows I play video games because I have a penchant for pushing a button every five seconds for hours at a time.

The RPG equivalent of the “Can you hear me now?” commercial.

The game tries to sell itself on having a cast that could easily be mistaken for an anime convention, but that turns out to be one of its largest flaws. With so many characters on screen competing for lines of dialogue, each scene plays out like the voice actors each picked out random lines from a drunken Sarah Palin rant, resulting in less coherency than a conversation between an alzheimer’s patient and a stroke victim. Even the gameplay mechanics suffer with such a large cast. Games like the PS1 Final Fantasies gave you 6 to 8 characters, and let you have half of them in your party at any given time. Imagine six people in a jacuzzi trying to level up the water. Even with a small bucket, you can fill that thing within a few hours. But when you need a pool large enough for 30 people and the game doles out exp with an eyedropper, you’re going to be filling it for weeks, and by the end someone is bound to have a yeast infection.

Compelling dialogue revealing information that is not at all superficial or irrelevant to the story!

Myriad flaws plague this game, such as the control scheme which is, as best I can describe, dyslexic button mapping. Nothing is intuitive. The triangle button opens the main menu unless in battle when you use the start button although if you select a healing spell a different menu will open up and you can find an abbreviated menu if you press up or down on the left control stick. In different places you can cycle through characters using the R and L buttons, the left and right D-pad buttons, or maybe the up and down D-pad. In those latter situations, the other buttons on the D-pad might cycle through menu options, or they may reset the digital clock by your bed.

Set your own formation in a crapshoot of targeting options!

They also charge enough to resurrect characters to make me ask about an in-game health insurance plan. If the game is stingy on exp, then the way it awards money might qualify it to be the protagonist of next year’s TV Christmas specials. But that’s fine, because the game will gladly let you go into debt to bring your characters back to life. I’ve never been worried about a video game coming to break my knees if I couldn’t pay it, but I guess it serves as a good lesson on economic oppression; if you couldn’t afford the weapons and armor to survive before, you sure as hell aren’t going to survive while in debt unless you go back to the beginning of the game (unless that’s where you’re dying) and work for less than minimum wage for longer than anyone should ever have to “play” a game. You heard it here first; Cross Edge is why we need Bernie Sanders.

But easily the biggest flaw with this coffee-table coaster reject is the battle system. [Deep breath] Where do I begin? In addition to all of those problems mentioned before, Cross Edge uses a battle system more difficult to understand than college physics–a claim easily supported by comparing the grades on my transcript with the grades the game assigns at the end of each fight. It requires learning a combination of a grid system, equipping and leveling up skills, juggling nearly a dozen different skill types, chaining attacks, learning which attacks ban be chained, finding the right combination of prerequisites to activate special attacks, following three different “break” gauges for all combatants, finding just the right place to stand on a grid system that will allow your character to use the attacks, dealing overkill damage to enemies to make them drop items, leveling up your equipment, and…I don’t know. Honestly, I think I missed some things in there.

The visual assault of the interface is the only combat you’re likely to see.

It plays as though they took all the rejected features from all the games featured in Cross Edge and threw them together just for the sake of using them up, as if next year they wouldn’t get the same budget for combat ideas if they had too many lying around. The tutorial they give you for this mulligan stew of combat mechanics might make for a good fortune cookie message, and they throw it all at you at the beginning of the game without so much as saying, “Oh by the way, about three quarters of these features won’t be accessible until five hours or more into the game.” Combine that with the “cat jumped on the keyboard during button mapping” control schema, and I spent probably a total of an hour on menu screens thinking I was doing it wrong. I didn’t like Resonance of Fate, but to its credit it offered an in-game textbook for me to study up on. Cross Edge barely has anyone who can give a rough explanation on the entire fucking Internet.

I look at games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Profile and think, “The only reason I hated them the first time through was because I didn’t know how to play them correctly.” And ever since then I’ve insisted on finishing games, giving them the benefit of the doubt, shouldering all the blame myself like I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. And while I did like those two games, I really can’t say the same thing for anything else. I can excuse the PS1 level graphics that other critics have whined about. I don’t even mind the conversations being told via pre-drawn character art like an NDS game. But playing a game that makes me track more names than a George Martin novel, taking place in a large vacuous world with a story not even good enough to use as a sleep aid and requiring hours of study before I even can figure out how to play the game…let’s just say I have a shelf full of games vying for my attention, and I won’t deny them that out of a stubborn refusal to abandon this travesty.