CrossCode review

written 2026-04-06

CrossCode is an action RPG that I first played in 2021, and replayed with some new game+ modifiers in 2026-03. My overall opinion is that its combat is worse than most other games I've played, and its puzzles are mediocre, but its story, the sheer depth of its world and all the cute little character interactions make it worth it.

Overall structure

Its structure is like that of a western RPG: a linear main story with always a clear objective, and a ton of optional side quests. The main story mostly consists of a loop where you explore an area with new enemy types and lots of optional "jumping puzzles", reach a town, and eventually enter a dungeon. Each dungeon contains puzzles and battles against waves of enemies, and then finally a boss and a reward.

It has traditional RPG mechanics like grindable experience and money, a skill tree, and equipment that gets obsoleted by later equipment with higher stats. Grindable experience causes problems because enemies are not scaled to your level, which means if you do a lot of side quests or random fighting, you get overleveled and the game becomes too easy. There is a new game+ modifier that scales enemies like this, but you can't enable it for a first playthru (and some parts of the game are not designed with it in mind, making them way too hard or easy).

Combat

You have 4 main abilities: melee attacks, ranged attacks, dash, and block. You get a resource over time called SP which you spend on special abilities called combat arts.

About your attack options, the core tradeoff is that melee does more damage while ranged is safer. Melee also can hit multiple enemies and stun, but charged ranged shots can inflict status effects.

Also, because of how you aim ranged attacks and how precise the game expects you to be with it, I consider this very much a mouse and keyboard game, I think playing it with a gamepad would be miserable.

About your defense options, dashing is fast and has almost no cooldown, but most enemies track you very well so you have to dodge at the exact right moment for it to work. Blocking is easy but lets a proportion of damage thru. The proportion is affected by certain upgrades and equipment, which causes balance issues; it's too weak in early game but too strong late, especially if you have the right build.

Also, blocking at the last moment is a "perfect guard", which lets no damage thru and often stuns the enemy too. I dislike this mechanic because it lets you trivialize the rest of the game with just good timing. I also dislike the implementation because, like the chip damage proportion, the length of the time window for perfect guard scales with a stat, which means in early game it's impractical and in late game fairly easy.

You take hitstun from most enemy attacks, but have no invulnerability-on-hit, so you can get stunlocked and killed from full health by many normal enemies, which sucks.

There's also random critical hits, on both player and enemy attacks, which makes this worse, since with bad luck a single hit can take most of your health.

Speaking of hitstun, I think that combat arts should not be interruptable. Many of them have long casting time, so they're pretty useless and frustrating to try to use against multiple enemies (which is most fights).

A mechanic I really like is the element system (heat, cold, shock, and wave). You and a few enemies can change your element during battle, which means different stats, combat arts, and resistances. And unlike most other games with elements, they don't have directional counter relationships; instead, opposite elements both deal *and* take more damage from each other, and same elements less. This means picking element can actually be interesting even against just one enemy: it's roughly an offense versus defense decision, but mixed with other things since you have different stats and combat arts. To give an example of how deep these interactions can get, here are my first playthru notes on my strategy for a boss that uses heat in phase 1, shock in phase 2, and switches rapidly between them in phase 3:

In phase 1, always be wave because I can avoid most of his attacks and wave has my favorite combat art (a ranged attack that seeks and heals me), unless it's time to attack and I have full health, then be cold to do more damage. In phase 2, be shock most of the time because I find his attacks much harder to dodge so having the right elemental resistance is more important. During windows to attack, switch to wave to cast the healing attack and then switch back to shock. In phase 3, switch between shock and wave more frequently, staying as wave during fire attacks.

Elemental decision making is also deepened by elemental overload: if you use elemental attacks too much, you get overloaded and forced to stay in neutral mode for a while, and you're generally weaker in neutral mode. This encourages you to pick some time to be neutral preemptively so you don't get stuck neutral at a bad time.

The last combat mechanic I want to talk about is allies. For much of the game, you can have up to 2 allies, and unlike most other action games where you fight with allies, they're powerful. It's actually like having a team of 3 players. I like how they're implemented, though I would've liked it much more if you could interact with them more (for example, if you could heal or buff each other). Sadly, the game isn't balanced around this variable team size. Most fights are pretty hard by yourself, but very easy if you have a full team. The only thing the game does to stop you from trivializing it this way is... outright stop you from bringing allies into most quests. Which is pretty lame, especially when they play such a large role in the story and their dynamic dialogue is so fun.

CrossCode shows damage numbers on each hit, but doesn't tell how stats translate into those numbers so stat choices are still largely blind. In the skill tree, you see numbers on stat upgrades, but not on combat arts, nor even a demonstration of the casting time and hitboxes before you invest in them. And I was a few times screwed over by my biggest combat arts costing all my SP and then just completely missing because their hitbox is weirdly shaped in some way I couldn't know except thru trial and error. You can refund skill points, but a limited number of times and you have to travel for it.

Enemy design

Enemy design is where I think CrossCode is really bad. There are a few design flaws that apply to many of its enemies:

Most have absurd levels of tracking, which means dodging is useless unless done at the exact right moment, and finding out when that is just takes much trial and error. You usually can't react to the telegraph because it's too early. And the symptoms of dodging too early and too late look similar, so you can't even easily tell which way you're going wrong. For many CrossCode enemies, even after I'd been fighting them for hours I still didn't understand how to dodge them reliably. It just sometimes works and sometimes not for no clear reason, very frustrating.

Many are invulnerable most of the time, and you just have to wait for them to become vulnerable. This applies to most flying or digging enemies; flying enemies often can only be hit by ranged, and sometimes fly a level higher so you can't hit them even with ranged, and just stay there for a while. They can even attack while out of your range.

Many are near immune to either melee or ranged, which is lame because it reduces your range of tactical options.

An enemy flashing red means that it's about to do a big attack, *or* that it's stunned and vulnerable.

This is a big one that applies to all bosses and some normal enemies: turn-basedness. They are nearly invulnerable normally, and something has to be done to "break" them which stuns and makes them vulnerable (or sometimes makes them vulnerable but doesn't stun, which is a nasty surprise, or sometimes doesn't even make them vulnerable but just changes their shield to a different mode where it has to be broken in a different way, which is a nastier surprise). Basically it's "the enemy's turn" by default and "your turn" when they're broken. This turn-based nature hurts the element mechanic, because while an enemy is broken, you don't have to think about defense so only one element makes sense to be: whatever they take most damage from. The opposite while an enemy is not broken. Although usually they get broken by something you do, you still often have to wait for the opportunity.

Most bosses have very few different attacks (many only 2) so they're very repetitive. CrossCode boss fights are also longer than most other games, because of both their health and how long it takes to break them, which worsens the repetition.

This is more of a level design issue than an enemy design issue, but sometimes you can't see enemies' telegraphs because there are too many in the arena at once, with damage numbers and visual effects all over everything, or because some of them are behind terrain.

Puzzles

Each dungeon introduces new mechanics for logical puzzles. They never explain how they work, you're supposed to experiment and figure it out. Which is fun when it works, but not so fun when you're stuck for 10 minutes because you didn't try something you had no reason to try. I think puzzles could be designed better to encourage you to try the things that will reveal useful information.

It's also a bit disappointing that the puzzle mechanics from different dungeons have very little interaction with each other. Each dungeon introduces a new element and a couple of things that interact with it, but not with any others.

Also, many puzzles require you to bounce projectiles off walls at such precise angles that sometimes I was trying the correct solution but decided it had to be wrong because I couldn't get the angle perfect.

There is another kind of puzzle in the game, what I call jumping puzzles, where you can see a chest on a raised area and have to find a path to reach it. These are different from dungeon puzzles in that they don't use any of the dungeon mechanics and are usually completely optional, just lead to chests containing mildly useful items. The main mechanic they use is that you can jump between equal-height areas, but can only climb up in 1-unit increments, and there's mostly 2-unit increments, with few spots that are odd numbers to act as as ladders. The challenge of these puzzles is to find the climb spots needed to reach your goal, which are often far away.

I don't really like the idea of these because they're more tests of observance than of logical thinking, and I don't really like the implementation because the game's perspective makes it hard to know the elevation of surfaces, and often falling means you have to walk a long way back to the start of the course. I enjoyed them anyway, but I don't think they're interesting puzzles.

Story

The story is about an MMORPG named CrossWorlds, and an amnesiac woman named Lea trying to regain her memory by playing it along with her tech support guiding her from outside the game. This two-layer fourth wall is interesting because there's characters that are part of CrossWorlds and there's characters that are players of CrossWorlds, and the players can comment on the game content, which is sometimes funny. But often this is used poorly, just for the creators to praise themselves. For example, many bosses have player characters in the next room that talk about how cool it was, even though every boss sucks.

Lea is a semi-silent protagonist. I've always hated the silent protagonist trope because it breaks stories, but this time there's an in-universe explanation! Her avatar speech synchronization is broken, so she can't speak, but a hack is used to give her the ability to say a few specific words. As a bonus, it's sometimes cute to see how she communicates with such a limited vocabulary. Although the in-universe explanation isn't quite sound because there are many ways they could get around it with some effort, I still really appreciate having it.

Overall, the story is great. Its core idea eventually revealed from Lea's memories is a powerful one (but a major spoiler), all the major characters are likable, and the plot is unpredictable yet coherent. It also has a mid-game climax so exciting that it feels like it should be the end of the game! And yet, the actual end manages to feel like a proper escalation and conclusion. I've read very few stories this good, in any medium.